Working in another country? (England)

[completelyinlove]

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone has experience obtaining a job in another country? I will be graduating in May with my degree in electrical engineering and would possibly like to work in my SO country. I'm from the U.S and she lives in England. Does anyone know how difficult it is to obtain an engineering job in England, or how to go about even applying for jobs there?

[Alsfia]

I don't have a degree yet and I don't know how the job market is in your specific field, but I had a really hard time to get any job since I didn't have a British reference, and some bigger companies would not even consider me because of this, and since I didn't go to school in England or had any previous job there I couldn't really find anyone to write one, and I'm still within the EU. But hey, as I said, I don't have a degree yet (only equivalence to A-levels and diverse work experience) so it might be easier for you

(I did end up getting a job as a barmaid though, so now it theoretically should be easier for me to get a job there since my wonderful boss was nice enough to not only help me with opening a bank account but also promised to be my reference if ever needed )

[Alsfia]

Forgot to answer your second question

First thing you need to do is to get a national insurance number https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance ,even if most employers don't require one until you've been hired it's going to save you quite some hassle.

Second, start working on gathering all the information to open a bank account. I kid you not, it took me over 2 months and a lot of arguing to open one, at one point they even wanted me to pay for it, though I did end up at a really crappy branch. You'll probably need your visa, date of entry and a validation of you home address in UK, and possibly some bills (appliances and stuff like that) or even better, a letter from an employer on headed paper or from a school validating your US address. Validating your UK address before you're employed will be troublesome but what I understood when I was opening one (with HSBC) is that a validation of your former address abroad could be enough.

The rest should be like anywhere else, hand out CVs and let people know you're available and so on. Feel free to PM me if you have any further questions Best of luck!

[completelyinlove]

Thank you so much for the replies.

[Alsfia]

No problem

[leonsfangirl]

Hi,
What Visa will you be applying for?

[pink elephant]

Before you can work in England, you will need a visa that shows you are allowed to work in the UK. You cannot apply for a national insurance number without a work visa (or a student visa who plans to work within the legal limits) and you cannot apply for a UK bank account without having two pieces of evidence showing you have an address in the UK. (Well, actually one bank I know of is rather lenient..)

Unfortunately, UK immigration law is going under tons of changes and a lot of ways people could come in visas through various schemes and programs have been scrapped. I would imagine your field of engineering would be attractive to most employers - however it's on the employers to prove that they could hire no one else but you in order to sponsor you for a visa via tier 2 (first they look at UK citizens, then EU citizens, then you!) so there's tons of competition. But it doesn't hurt to e-mail employers and try applying for jobs anyway - a few friends of mine (Americans) have applied for jobs in England and have received interviews, but the issue was that they did not have a UK visa. Employers are interested, they just have a hard time sponsoring people.

It definitely helps to have some UK experience, so it might be an idea to apply for an internship in England or check out BUNAC.

(For the record, after receiving a UK visa, it took me about 10 months until I got a job offer of any kind and it was a temp contract, and a year until I got offered a full-time permanent job. You'll probably have more luck finding jobs in England!)

[Ahava]

I worked a couple of summers in the UK in the 90's without a national insurance number o.O

[completelyinlove]

Thanks for the replies. I don't think I'll be doing that BUNAC stuff. I don't like to pay to work. I'm going to start emailing companies that are hiring on UK indeed.

[digitalfever]

I'd recommend looking into graduate schemes in the UK. You can read more about them at targetjobs and they'll even tell you if they are willing to take on graduates that need a work permit or not.

[pink elephant]

Hmm, well I've learned that you can start work without a national insurance number, but you would just be paying more tax. It's better to have one so that you pay the appropriate amount of tax depending on what you earn and because you're paying for social security anyway.

But rules on who needs to have a national insurance number may have changed since then, plus they differ depending where you're from - especially between EU and non-EU citizens living and working in the UK. Yay complication and rules!

[weetzie]

I got a job in the Netherlands through Monster. I am from the US. I am eligible for Irish citizenship through my grandfather, so it makes me able to be hired anywhere in the EU just like a normal citizen would. Do you have any parents or grandparents from a EU country? You can then look into that to see if you can get citizenship (it's different for each country.) Then if so, just apply saying you're planning on moving to UK and looking for a job. Offer to pay for the airfare for the interview. You may be reimbursed later. You might also be able to get Highly Skilled Worker visa depending on how much they'd pay you. Not sure if UK has that, but Netherlands did.