Interview: Laura Garcia — Your Career Success Starts With How You See Yourself

There are coaches who understand the international job search intellectually. Laura Garcia understands it from the inside. She arrived in Perth from Spain eleven years ago on a Special Program visa through AIESEC, full of hope and completely unprepared for what the Australian job market would actually feel like from the inside. Student visas, no local experience, sponsorship that felt out of reach. Years of navigating a system that was not designed with her in mind. And then, gradually, something shifted. She built her entire Australian career on three student visas, always in professional office roles, earning promotions, negotiating sponsorship, and eventually reaching a management position. Today, as a career coach recognised as one of Perth’s fifteen best and founder of The Stand Out Method, she helps international professionals, and especially international women, stop disappearing into the application black hole and start being impossible to overlook.

The Origin Story: One Decision That Changed Everything

Laura’s story begins in Vilagarcía, Spain, with a friend’s offhand suggestion and a moment of decision she almost did not make. “I remember thinking: I don’t want to wake up in ten years wondering what would have happened if I’d tried.” So she applied, arrived in Perth planning to stay one year, and ended up building a life and a career she never anticipated.

What followed was anything but linear. Years navigating student visas. Constantly adapting. Learning the hard way how the Australian market actually works from the inside. For more than eight years she worked at the intersection of international education and employability in Perth, running workshops, coaching students and professionals, building employer engagement programmes, and supporting career development across sectors including government, higher education, engineering, IT, marketing, accounting, architecture, and project management.

That breadth of exposure gave her something genuinely rare: she has seen both sides of the hiring table. She knows what makes a capable international professional get overlooked. And she knows exactly what it takes to change that. “I’ve been in my clients’ shoes. Not metaphorically. Literally.”

The coaching certification she completed in 2021 was the turning point that made everything click, giving a structured framework to the intuition she had been developing for years. In 2023 she launched her own practice, and was subsequently recognised as one of Perth’s fifteen best coaches, a moment that generated an overwhelming response from clients and peers and confirmed she was on the right path.

A Coaching Philosophy Built Around One Honest Observation

Laura’s coaching philosophy is grounded in something she discovered through her own experience before she ever worked with a single client: the problem is rarely a lack of skills. It is almost always a lack of clarity about your own value and how to communicate it.

“When your self-concept shifts, everything changes. You don’t just get a new job. You become someone who knows their worth and goes after it confidently, in any room, in any language.” That framing, placing identity and self-perception at the centre of the career coaching process rather than treating the job search as a purely technical challenge, shapes every aspect of how she works.

Her approach is empowering and practical in equal measure. She moves fast, holds clients accountable, and focuses relentlessly on what can actually be controlled and acted on. There is no waiting and no hoping in her programmes. There is strategy and execution.

The Stand Out Method: Practical, Identity-Focused, and Built for the Australian Market

As a career coach working with international professionals across a wide range of industries and sectors, Laura has developed The Stand Out Method, a programme built on the recognition that job searching is not just a practical challenge. It is an emotional and identity one too.

Every client leaves every session with specific things to do, not just things to think about. The work covers positioning, resume strategy tailored specifically to the Australian market, networking with intention, interview preparation, and salary and sponsorship negotiation. It is all grounded in what can actually be moved forward on, adapted to the specific sector and context each client is navigating.

Running alongside the practical tools is a strong confidence-building thread that runs through everything she does. Many of her clients, particularly international women, arrive knowing far more than they give themselves credit for. “My job is to hold up a mirror, help them articulate their story clearly, and rebuild the self-belief that the job search process can quietly chip away at.” Accountability is built into every engagement through shared tracking, clear agreements, and honest check-ins. She is, by her own description, both the supportive coach and the one who says: okay, let’s move. Both, she is clear, are needed.

Staying Ahead of a Job Market That Keeps Changing

Laura’s approach to ongoing professional development reflects the same urgency she brings to her client work. This year she completed AI for Career Coaching through CICA, because AI is already reshaping how people search for jobs, how resumes are screened, and what employers expect. She needs to be able to coach her clients through that shift, not just around it.

She is also completing Career Wayfinding with Metaphors, Storytelling, and Hope, which explores how mapping, narrative, and metaphor can activate insight and forward momentum, particularly powerful when working with clients navigating uncertainty and significant career transitions.

Beyond specific skills, she frames ongoing learning as a matter of humility. “It reminds you that there’s always more to discover about people, about change, and about what it means to support someone through a genuinely vulnerable process.” Being recognised as one of Perth’s top coaches has made her more committed to that growth, not less.

Final Insight: The Problem Is Almost Never Your Experience

Laura closes with a message aimed directly at the international professionals she works with most, the ones sending applications into silence and wondering if their experience counts in the Australian market.

“The problem is almost never your experience. It’s almost always how you’re presenting it, and what story you’re telling about yourself.” She speaks specifically to international women who are resilient, capable, and adaptable, yet consistently underestimate what they bring. “You don’t need more qualifications. You don’t need to start over. You need someone to help you see what’s already there and communicate it so clearly that employers can’t look away.”

It is a message she is uniquely positioned to deliver, not because she studied the experience from the outside, but because she lived it herself, visa by visa, promotion by promotion, until she built something she is proud of and now helps others do the same.

To connect with Laura Garcia or explore The Stand Out Method, visit her on LinkedIn.