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Moving Between Countries?
An anonymous reader writes "In six months' time, I am packing up and moving from Australia (Melbourne) to Canada (Vancouver). I'm a qualified network engineer. What I want to know is, what sort of quirks and tricks I am going to have to get used to in the Canadian job market? I'm used to Australian recruiters, and all the hoops you have to jump through, but Canada may have different hoops. I've tried contacting recruiters directly for information but they don't really give out much, as I am not actually in the country yet and therefore not worth their time. Is anyone willing to share their experiences on making the big move from country to country?"
Mate, things work pretty similar the world over for an engineer, the research you need to do is more so with visa and living arrangements.
In terms of your work, the situation is mostly the same, be it Canada, UK, Australia, in that you are expected to hold a professional attitude, and be good with your work. You will find Australians have strong work ethic reputations abroad, so you need to back that up.
Short of that, you merely need to be resourceful, and you don't necessarily need to go through recruiters. Get your resume up to speed, make sure it is within 2 pages so as not to waste others time, and advertise your skills and project work so as to give potential employment a good honest run down on your skillset.
Print it out 20-50 times, and go walk through the front door in professional attire and give it to reception, possibly ask to see if they are seeking help.
With a skills shortage of competent engineers, you will gain employment fast, and gain the margin a recruiter normally takes.
Every top 500 needs engineers, and google for the integration/IT comms companies in your city of settlement.
If you work with specialist sectors like network/comms, speak to the local distributors to find out what integrators work with those products.
Hope this helps.
MantiX
IT CEO.
I'm in Australia (Adelaide) Looking to move countries too!
;).
Canada and New Zealand are the two places I have been seriously considering, and it looks like Auckland, New Zealand has won me over. (I have a really close friend there for one, and NZ is a beautiful country.)
I'm a Software Engineer and Systems Administrator in my current role. Anyway, guess I should read what people post as that stuff my apply to me too
I bet Americans are wondering why on earth we would want to leave Australia.....
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Moving to another country, you need to familiarize yourself with the important laws and assumptions that are being made there. So, go direct to the source: find a reputable lawyer to talk to, and swallow the few $100 it will cost for several hours of his time. And, that's a LAWYER IN THE COUNTRY YOU ARE MOVING TO.
There are a variety of different topics you will want to discuss, so you might need to talk to more than one lawyer. BUT DO IT. You are no longer a visitor, so you need to understand the ins and outs of the local legal system.
Here's some topics that are important:
These are but the most important I can cite off the top of my head. It's more than worth the cost of a short lawyer consultation, and you might even be able to get a good conversation out of one on the cheap (like, offer to pay for a good dinner and drinks out, since there's not going to be any paperwork or case, it's just a consultation).
Knowing the lay of the land is by far the most important thing to find out. Getting the inside scoop from an expert is the fastest, best way to do it.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
The reason why they are not supposed to take up references until after an offer is because you might not have told your boss you are looking until after you have a job to go to. It might ruin your job prospects of your boss finds out you are job hunting.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Recruiting the wrong person for a job is very, very costly, you'll end up paying a few months of salary before noticing the mistake, and then you have to re-do the entire hiring process again, which also costs money.
On that scale, five bucks for a phonecall is totally worth the money.
The Iraq war and anti-Islam propaganda has started turning the knuckle-draggers here into nationalists.
And you want to move to *America* to avoid that???
And what exactly do you expect me to tell you if I've been doing Java on Windows (deployed usually on Solaris) for the last ten years? Some of us just slid in such positions, and try to get out. I have extensive Linux and OpenBSD skills because that's what I do at home, but I cannot provide a single professional reference to that.
You'd essentially get my CV and think "another one of those useless guys"... Have you ever considered that at least some of those people try to get out of the Microsoft lock-in and do have some skills but simply didn't ever get a chance proving it?
I'm just saying because I'm one of those guys with what you consider a crap CV and I try to make it up in my cover letter. So far, nobody ever replied. Sure, recruiters call me, but there it stops.
The tip that most people give is that you should contribute to an open source project and get your name out. Fair enough.... That's about the only thing I can do about it and I doubt I'd get taken seriously by you even if I did.
Uh...
Canada, bro. Canada is *not* the USA. We don't assume people are shady because they don't fly flags and tie yellow ribbons around everything in sight here.
Pardon me, but these days it's the US Dollar that is weak. The Canadian Dollar has gained in value more than 10% against the USD over the last year. Interestingly, for the first time in over 30 years I have run across more than a few Canadian businesses that will not accept US cash.
As far as your Monopoly money analogy goes, well, guess who has the bigger counterfeiting problem? Hint: it's not Canada.
I moved from the UK to Vancouver a few years ago so my experiences might be a bit dated. I had the same response from the recruiters as you though - they will not treat you seriously unless you are resident.
:) - I figured on about 12 months - but you won't care as you'll probably be hitting the slopes quite a bit. Be persistent, hawk your resume around town to the major recruiters - fill in their questionnaires and put yourself around as much as possible to get your face known. Believe it or not, Vancouver can be a quite a conservative place for the job market - they don't like strangers, so get in there and network, network, network.
:)
It depends on the job market at the time as to how you'll fare, Vancouver is quite a small town as far as IT goes, so be prepared not to work for some time
Check out the local classifieds nearer the time, although there isn't usually much in there, but there might be. Also, check out Usenet - bc.jobs - to get a feel for what's active, you should probably be doing that now to get a feel for what is happening.
Be prepared to move around quite a bit - if you can work freelance, start up your own company which is quite easy to do and I would say is by far the best way to network and get known. It also means that you don't pass up on contract work. A relative doing the same as you worked for 3 companies in the first couple of years (as a "permie") so employment can be volatile - plan on it being this way. You can be "let go" easily in the first 6 months or so, so don't treat everything as a job for life. I did some work in Calgary for a while - this is a good way to see other cities but watch out for having to pay for accommodation twice. It helps to have relatives over here.
G'luck sport! See you around town
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
It is the same thing with job candidates who are interviewed but not hired, they never find out why because the HR department is afraid of being hit with a discrimination lawsuit. It is interesting or shocking, depending upon how one looks at it, to consider just how much the United States has changed since the end of WWII because of lawyers and lawsuits. It is hard to find any part of American life that has not been altered by the ever present threat of litigation. In the long run the lawsuit society plays right into the hands of the nanny state as people abandon personal responsibility and surrender their rights and freedoms to the state in exchange for the illusions of security and prosperity.
A couple of people have commented about the importance of sorting out the work visa situation. I'll second that, with emphasis on getting it completed before you enter the country. Most nations, including Canada, you can't apply from within the country. Of course, this creates a Catch 22 in which the strongest justification for issuing the visa comes from having a prospective employer write a letter of offer. And that rarely happens without an interview, or two, or sometimes three, in person. So yeah, it may be necessary to come here for a couple of months ahead of time to do interviews.
I've been trying out recruiters lately. I can recommend a couple, if you want to contact me privately. I can also list several that have, for me at least, proved to be a complete waste of time. Odds are, you can do far better looking on your own. In Vancouver, check out the BC Techlology website: http://www.bctechnology.com/frameset_emp.html
The other comment I'd like to make is that, at least acccording to my experience, there is not much that can be generalized about how employers interview, what they look for, or what you can expect to find after accepting a given position. I think we're generally honest people here in Canada, but it's a young industry in a young culture, and so every organization makes up its own rules and expectations. The interview process is almost entirely directed at finding out about you. Except for a few bare facts, you won't learn much about the organization or the people you'll be working with. What you do learn is designed to make the organization look good, rather than to disclose what sort of challenges and difficulties you can expect from the position. And given the high degree of variability that I mentioned, you really won't know what you've gotten yourself into until the first day on the job. I'm sure this is true the world over, but it has a particular flavor on the west coast of Canada. On one hand, we're bound by Canadian politeness and a mild social reserve that can be hard to break through. On the other hand, we aspire to some form of American entrepreneurialism and the frankness that goes with it. I'm delighted by our West coast liberalism and our tolerance for different cultures, but if I may say so, we're not yet as fully evolved as we think we are. You have an advantage as an Aussie, I think, in that you have lived within a similar cultural paradox. Ours ends up perhaps a bit less tolerant of people being outspoken.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.