Welcome, to follow is a post on how I started an initial search for jobs in Australia while in the UK (England).

One of the things that worried me about moving to Australia from England was that I would be arriving in a new country with no knowledge of how the job market was and how my CV should be presented.

So what did I do? I did my CV as I would have completed it for a job in England.

An unfortunate thing happened a year before the visa came and I got made redundant but it gave me a chance to get my CV up to date and I was lucky enough to have some contacts in the recruitment world that took my CV and gave me some good feedback and I had to change a few things round to make it more “modern”. I had been in the same company for ten years so it had been a while since updating. So with my fairly recently updated CV I completed it.

On my CV I made a copy as an “Australian” one, no I never had G’Day mate and all the other cliches, what I did state was that I had a 175 Permanent Visa granted, I put my Skype details and double checked my email address. This information was placed high up on the CV. I did put my expected date of entry to Australia but I would be tempted to leave that information off if more then 2 months away (Unless of course you have a very specialised role). I even would be tempted to not disclose the fact that you are not in Australia if applying. Your call though.

CV done what next? Well I would not even think of applying for roles unless you have an actual date and that date is within two months. I tried applying for a few when I had months to go, as stated on my CV, and never got a look in.

So what can you do if you have more then two months? There is nothing to stop you looking at roles on websites to make sure that your skill set is needed and if you have not yet made a choice of where you are heading it makes sense to search for roles in each state and record the number of roles, stated salary. This will all help when you start to narrow down your final destination.

Where do I look for roles in Australia? I set up searches and got daily digested emails from www.seek.com.au and www.careerone.com.au and it gave me a really valued insight to the market and how it was trending.

I got my Linkedin profile updated and stated that I was looking for opportunities in Brisbane, this works well as long as everyone in your contacts / network is aware you are looking!

Within Linkedin I started to join the groups based in Australia that I was interested in and slowly made a few contacts.

I made contact with a couple of recruitment agencies that I had noticed had jobs in the areas I was looking. I requested that they have a look at my CV and let me know if they thought I would be in demand, when to start looking and make contact and also salary expectations. Some agencies replied and some didn’t, some helpful and yes you guessed it some unhelpful. From the agencies though it made me have a clue as to the ones to make contact with during the first few weeks of landing.

So to summarise my initial job searching:

• Get your CV up to date
• Use your “standard” UK CV but add in the header your visa status etc.
• Update profile on Linkedin
• Join Australian groups i.e. Australian IT Jobs
• Get digested job emails
• Contact agencies that advertise the roles you suit

Part two will be coming soon.