Getting a job in Australia

People often ask me about the situation of the job market and availability of work here. Well there is the short answer and the long answer.

Short answer would be: everyone who is active and determined will at least survive.

As for the long answer lets narrow it down by assuming the point of view of a (temporary or permanent) migrant.

Australia has some unique properties to their job market which regarding migrants get regulated by the government using some cunning visa policies.

There are shortages of local work force in:
•    manual labour intensive and often seasonal areas of farming
•    all even a little skilled positions in remote and regional areas
•    skilled and highly skilled positions in the cities

To satisfy the need, there are several visa options available for migrants:
•    Working Holiday Visa
•    Regional Sponsored Visa
•    Employer Sponsored Visa
•    Independent Skilled Migrant Visa

Working Holiday Visa is by far the most popular visa, as it is accessible to young people and don’t have many limitations to it as far as applying goes. There are however some limitations to what you can do with it and some incentives to go and relieve the farm work hands shortage. Firstly you are allowed to work only for 6 months for one employer. This is to direct you to seasonal jobs and make it harder for you to compete for permanent positions, thus reduce the risk that you take jobs away from local people. The second being a promise to extend your visa for another year if you work at least three months in regional farming or related position. This is there to direct you even more to seasonal farm works.

These aspects combined with the fact that most people coming with this visa are young, inexperienced and irresponsible gives this visa a bad name in the eyes of the employers (or worse, in Australia mostly in the eyes of employment agents, more on that later) and the result is that it’s very hard to find a well paid, sustainable and skilled (as opposed to muscle based) job. As you see, the government has succeeded here in creating a visa that gives a hard time to compete with locals and is good at filling the workforce shortages in unwanted jobs.

I won’t go into much detail about the rest of the visas, other than don’t think it is easy to get an employer sponsored visa or an independent skilled migrant visa. Can be done but needs you to prove that you are worthy and the obstacles are quite real.

For rural manual jobs times have changed a lot. It all started when some farmers wanted to cut costs and began hiring SE-Asian people for fruit picking. They worked much faster and we’re happy with a lot less money. This resulted in locals moving to other areas of work and Asians raising their rates after a few years to levels beyond the original salary of the locals. The original Aussie pickers of course did not want to work there anymore and farmers got screwed over by their own greed. So the government needed to be creative and these new visas were put in place. This was all good until too many people started coming here for work, especially in the light of economic downturn, everybody thinking it’s easy to make money in the farms and being sure that there has to be a good position for me in the city as well. Now there are big signs at the gates of many farms that no workers are needed and there is generally an over-saturation in this field.

Two aspects however have to be noted. Firstly farm work is hard, repetitive, dirty and very boring. Young people coming here have probably never done any manual labour before and are also impatient, so they don’t last long either because they decide to try luck somewhere else or the quality of their work is unacceptable. So workers change very often and hardworking people are valued and will not have a hard time.

Secondly in the big farming centers like Mildura, VIC and Bundaberg, QLD work is almost exclusively distributed through Hostels (Backpackers as they are called in Australia). This means that you have to pay for the hostel owner to find you work and more importantly as you call the hostel owner to ask for work they often lie to you about work being available to lure you to stay at their place and pay for it. By the way this kind of behavior is called: “being positive” in Australia and is noticeable in other areas of life as well. Sometimes it’s very hard to get a straight answer about the core issue to improve your actions.

These working hostels also mean that you have to spend your evenings with young people who like to drink and smoke a lot, so you’ll end up spending a lot of money instead of saving to get out of the hellhole as fast as possible. Staying in caravan parks in a tent or private cabin with focused friends will save you a lot of money and will enable to have more fun in places where you would actually enjoy it.

Last note on the rural work: buying your own car for a party of 4 is a BIG advantage in finding work and saving money.

Finding a job in the cities is a topic I will discuss in the next installment, stay tuned.