Tag Archives: business

From Portugal to UK

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So you are thinking of leaving Portugal and heading north for work?

here are a couple of tips from someone that did just that, this is mostly for IT people coming from Portugal after finishing university, however any person that wants to work here might find something useful, check the links sections after the article for useful links 🙂

euro pass CV? Big no no.

The first step to get a job is to get an interview. The first step to get an interview is to impress with your CV. While in Portugal loads of companies ask for a euro pass formatted CV, in the UK they absolutely hate it. And they are quite right to do so. There are lots of templates around the internet, find a good one, then edit it to make it more personal.

Prepare for 3 months

The idea of getting a job in the UK while you are in Portugal, is nice, however you either have to be very lucky or have really good connections. What usually happens is that you need to save enough money to live without an income source for three months, once you get here, start to search for work immediately, the first month you will be adapting to how things work and you should get some interviews where your lack of experience will show, but don’t worry too much each bad interview will make you do the next one a bit better. if money is running low consider applying for a job in a different area while you don’t get your IT break.

Documents

While an ID card should let you do everything you need, it is a lot less complicated if you get a passport. The other document you need to be able to work is a national insurance number, this  should be easy enough to get, but it does take a week more or less to get it. This should be one of the first things you do when you get here.

Cities & Salary

Living in big cities is more expensive and therefore salaries tend to be higher in big cities. London is definitely the most expensive city, you can easily find rooms for 1000 pounds a month which I find a bit crazy. 90% of job adverts state how much the company is willing to pay you, they do this using an annual rate, for a junior developer you should never get less than 16k, 18k is good and 20k is great (these values should be higher in London).

Recruitment agencies

The recruitment market is ruthless, so be careful on how you deal with these guys, if they want to forward your CV its a good thing. However keep track of who is sending your details and  where they are sending them. If a company gets 5 copies of your CV from different recruitment agencies it will do more harm than good.

Links

these will get you started but always search a bit on google

Jobs search engines  :

Housing – http://www.rightmove.co.uk

find out how much you are going to get a month – SavingMoneyExpert

Government information – DirectGov

if you need any more information, I will be glad to help just leave a comment 🙂