I’m a young-ish American with an itch to work abroad. In my college days there were a couple options available (the late, lamented BUNAC being one), but my options now are a bit slimmer. I’m college-educated and with some professional experience, but I frankly don’t have critical skills (e.g. doctor, computer programmer) that would boost me to the top of the list or make an employer sponsor me. Anyone aware of ways to work abroad for someone in my situation? Are there equivalents of American green card visas I could apply for for other countries, or “working holiday” visas I’d qualify for? Or just interesting job opportunities overseas that are easy to get into?
(And I know teaching English is a good option, but I’m particularly interested in hearing about other ideas. Thanks!)
The State Deprtment is recruiting in many disciplines.
Many international firms advertise in fora such as the Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tirbune.
I remember reading trade papers (and regular British press) while working in Spain and the North Sea.
Some countries, like Spain, only require you to report to a local police station, fill out papers and you will receive a permit to reside. If and when you find work, the employer can help you obtain the proper permissions.
I normally don’t advocate like this, but you may want to consider Peace Corps. It depends on what your skills are, but in a lot of cases, Peace Corps acts almost as a job placement agency, setting people up to work with NGOs or local governments. It’s not all teaching English and digging wells.
Benefits: you get to work abroad, learn new skills, looks nice on your resume.
Downsides: it’s not very profitable, you aren’t going to be in any place very fancy.
One way is to volunteer for an NGO (non-government organization) that operates abroad, perhaps one which also has a US base. According to your skills and interests, this could include anything from the World Wildlife Fund to Engineers Without Borders. If you show promise, soon you could get hired as paid staff. I assume you speak, or are willing to put the effort into learning rather quickly, some foreign language.
I know many people will hate me for this suggestion, but you can teach English abroad in most places with little to no qualification. If you want to find a good job, I’d recommend a 150-hour TEFL training course.
I’m teaching in Korea with just a 20-hour TEFL certificate (though I am strongly considering getting the full load of courses soon). There’s lots of demand in east Asia, the Middle East and Latin America for teachers, but Korea is pretty much the only place where they’ll usually pay your airfare, if that’s a concern.
Hard to find TEFL work in Western Europe. I guess the French Riviera hit its saturation point for English teachers some time ago. Prague is reportedly just now hitting it.
You could look into working as a civilian on a military and/or NATO base somewhere. The United States still has military bases in Germany and the NATO SHAPE base still exists in Belgium. My mom briefly considered applying to teach at the Canadian school there. She is a teacher, though, qualified in Canada and at the time we were already living on the Canadian base in Germany (now closed). The civilians I knew on base were mostly there because one or both parents were teachers, but a few were doctors and I recall one journalist.
You don’t specify what your degree/background is, but if it’s at all technical you could look into companies with an international presence and work as a Field Service Representative and/or Integration Specialist (the titles for these jobs for two aerospace-related companies that I’m familiar with). If you are bilingual, your chances improve dramatically in getting hired for such a job.
There is also a small base called Shinnen in The Netherlands, a couple of bases in England, and one in Scotland at Holy Loch. Also in Rota, Spain; Italy has a couple, and I seem to remember one in Nicosea. On the other ocean, there are a number of bases in Japan.
Make sure that when you apply for work with the government that you are addressing a specific job announcement and that you address the specific qualifications within that announcement. Otherwise, your app will just go in the trash heap.
I’m teaching in Korea without even that; however, I’ll be getting a 120 hour course later this year. That’s because anything less doesn’t give a pay bump in the public schools here for NETs (Native English Teachers). The job is great and I’ve loved this country since my first experience living here oh-so-many years ago.
I picked apples in Tasmania back around 1990 or so. Wasn’t legal at the time, had to give a fake tax file #, but no one seemed too concerned, they just wanted to get the apples down. Didn’t make alot of money but enough to keep travelling for awhile. I got the impression fruit harvesting in Australia was generally pretty easy work to get back then (though not at all easy to do, you’ll earn every penny!:smack:), whether you were on a legal working holiday or not. This may have since changed. I think you may be able to get a working holiday visa now, maybe worth looking into.
Good luck & have fun!
You can also get a job in a tourism related field. I met a couple of Americans who were working as tour guides for bike tours in Munich last summer. Very low qualification threshold, although I’d guess that beyond tips they don’t make much, so you’d need to be pretty charismatic to live anything more than a bare bones existence. Do something like that for a while but pick up the local language and you can find other ways to fit in.
Yeah, I did this for a year. It’s pretty easy to get the visa too and can be done completely online. I was approved within a few days. You can technically do two years, but you have to do at least 3 months of rural work (so - fruit picking) to apply for the extension. Other than that you can take pretty much any job that will accept you, though there is a 6 month employment cap, so you can’t work with one place for the full year. You can also study for four months on this visa. Link. Costs roughly $200.
I did this last year. It costs about 400 to apply. Unskilled jobs were pretty difficult to land in the city on this visa, but I don’t know about the prospects for rural jobs. You can stay for 1 year, but you can’t hold a particular job for more than 6 months. This makes you pretty unattractive to most employers.
Any government agency is gonna do a long background check so if you’re in a hurry that won’t work. It can take months. I knew of one guy who took 2 years for the Peace Core to get back to him. But that’s a bit on the long side.
Hospitality isn’t gonna sponsor you, even with loads of experience, too easy to hire locally.
You can try religous organizations, many hire young people to work in teaching center and especially orphanages.
With the economy so bad it isn’t easy to get to a nice country. If you’re willing to go to places like Angola or Congo you have a lot more luck
If you mean it took him two years to get through the application process, this is a believable story. If you mean it literally took two years from his initial application to Peace Corps responding to him, I call bullshit. I’ve applied to Peace Corps twice, and both times they responded to my application very quickly - within a couple weeks or so.
The application process can be very long and tedious, though. I believe the average time between application and departure is around 6-9 months. It was about a year and a half for me. One guy I knew did it in 3 months, which is incredibly fast.
Addressing the bolded phrase, the queues of people who live on base overseas for most of the jobs that don’t require “special skills” are much longer than the available positions. They rarely look off base for them.
Look at USAJobs to find career level positions. Your college degree and experience should help. Many people on base (dependents/spouses) do not have degrees or relevant experience simply due to the nature of the military career. Moving every few years impedes both higher education and gathering useful work experience. Check with the big government contracting companies too, like Northrup-Grumman, HP (was EDS), and SAIC.
As others have noted, if you get one of these jobs, be prepared not to start work two weeks later. It can take months to get the paperwork (immigration, sponsorship) through the system for some countries. Some countries let you work while this is going on, others don’t. Working with the military can eliminate some of the hoops that NGO’s and other organizations may have to jump through. For cash flow planning, it is wise to ask about this.
I have also heard that teaching on military bases abroad is also a good bet. The kids are more likely to behave because the parents are more supportive. If a kid is a troublemaker, the parent gets heck for it. (So I’ve heard.)
In my experience as an expat living and working abroad (in Budapest) for over five years, this is how most expats I met got living and working there:
They were sponsored by an American company who sent them over
They applied to a foriegn company that sponsored them (my situation)
They were journalists who took up residence in the foreign country, using it as base while pitching and writing/photographing stories from the region and selling it abroad
They landed in the country for one reason or another (following a romance, sating their wanderlust, taking a “leave of absence” from the US to practice their art/write their novel, etc.), and parlayed their English skills into an editing or teaching job.
They were Type-A entrepreneurial go-getters starting their Eastern/Central European business ventures.
They were American foreign service employees.
They worked for NGOs.
And, yes, there were holiday workers and the such (I was BUNAC myself a couple years before I moved to Hungary and became and expat), but there wasn’t much that kind of work where I lived.
If you’re looking for “easy” ways to work abroad as an American, I’m not sure anything similar to BUNAC still exists. Teaching on military bases is probably the closest to that which I know of. Teaching English jobs in certain parts of the world are also probably a good lead, although certification of some sort is definitely becoming more and more desirable. While the days of just being a native English speaker qualifying you for a job aren’t completely gone, they are rapidly disappearing, from all that I could see. The working holiday visas I’m not so familiar with, but I would look into them, as they seem up your alley.
The foreign service exam is another option, although this is a more serious career commitment that what you seem to be asking for in your OP. I have two friends who have taken the test, passed, and become Foreign Service Officers, but it can be quite a challenging life.
I guess my questions are why do you want to work abroad, and how important is it to you? If you really want to work abroad, you can do it, and the easiest way is probably through English language skills.
