Highlights
- Sandra Martínez is a top executive for a major conglomerate
- Her rise up the career ladder started with a simple request
- She urges other women, especially from Latin America, to take career chances
For more than 35 years, Ms Martínez has held various executive positions within the Nestlé company, positions that had led her to live in countries such as Venezuela, the United States, Canada, Switzerland and for some time in Australia.
She currently serves as CEO of Nestlé Oceania and is one of the most prominent Latin American migrants in the Australian business circles.
With all this accumulated experience, Ms Martínez told SBS Spanish that her advice to others would be to firstly identify the support networks that existed in Australia for the professional development of migrants and rely on them to overcome challenges and achieve incorporation into the labour market.
She said she was 22 years old when she joined a program for young recent graduates offered by Nestlé in Ecuador.
Graduates had to spend a couple of years in that program before aspiring to a position within the company, she said.
However, within months and to the amazement of her manager, Ms Martínez said she had requested an opportunity to continue working in the company but at its headquarters in Switzerland.
"I had done about 15 months of the training they asked for,” she said.
“Logically, my boss was not very positive at first.
“He said I was taking a big risk but after a couple of days, he called me and said, 'Look there's a chance, but you'd have to go and apply there directly.
“’I'm going to give you a letter of recognition.'
“And that's how I started in Switzerland."
Ms Martínez said what motivated her to ask for the opportunity was her personal circumstances.
Her husband was about to start a master's degree in Switzerland and they both wanted to keep their small family together, she said.
I think the message is: never be afraid to ask. I knew that the company's headquarters were in Switzerland and so I asked if they could give me a chance to work there.
Once in Switzerland and with the possibility of a professional job, Ms Martínez said she had to rearrange her priorities because she was also travelling with her husband and their one-year-old son.
"The biggest challenge we had as a couple and as a family in the beginning, was to find ourselves alone from one moment to the next; when we came from a large family that was our centre and where all our energy came from," Ms Martínez said.
She said she and her husband made a conscious decision to embrace all of the positive aspects of living in another country.
If I had been thinking about everything I didn't have, everything I missed about my country, I would have gone crazy so I concentrated more on the good things I could find: I was learning a new language, and Switzerland is a beautiful country in which to walk and enjoy the mountains.
“I also had the possibility to introduce our son another language, to open his eyes to new cultures," Ms Martínez said.
She said the move to Switzerland had given her an opportunity to understand that the world went far beyond what she had previously believed, and that the same thing happened with opportunities.
She said she believed an important factor in her success had been that she had been raised in a family where the voice of women had the same or sometimes more value than that of men.
'Switzerland is a beautiful country': Sandra Martinez Source: Keystone
"I reached high-ranking positions at a relatively young age and suddenly people were asking me where my boss was,” Ms Martínez said.
“They thought I was the secretary so I told them: 'I am Sandra' and then they realised and respected the responsibility I had," she said.
