Can anyone out there help! My girlfriend and I arrived in Sydney after travelling for a year or so and have both been looking for work, her in HR and me in IT.

Thankfully after a couple of months of getting what seems to be quite regular feedback of "Sorry, we are looking for local experience" she managed to get a contract job with an international company. Great we though, this must be the pivotal point, things are starting to go our way and we can actually start living our lives here in Sydney rather than just existing but things haven't changed. She got her job about 6 weeks ago now and although it means we have been able to move out of my brother house in the Blue Mountains into a flat share in Sydney not a lot else has changed. All of the money she is now earning is going on paying for the flat and we are having to live a week to week existence because I cannot find a job.

Before we left I had seven years working as a software engineer for BAE Systems where I was regarded quite highly. The problem is that in that role you didn't just focus in on one thing, instead you moved around learning new languages, etc as you went. Now I seem to be stuck unable to find a job, I have even taken on working for free for a company to see if that will help but after my first month there I really don't see it going anywhere.

Basically does anyone have any novel ideas as to how I can find IT work. I'm still searching websites, speaking to IT recruitment agencies but nothing is working and we are getting close to the end of our tether. The funny thing is just prior to coming here I said that I wouldn't mind working in anything as long as I had a job but the more problems we face (financially) the more I realise that although money isn't the be all and end all it certainly helps and continuing my IT career really is the only way that we can have that financial security in the future.

Thanks (not sure if that is all rambling or not but I think I am finally conceeding that I/we need somewhere to vent this frustration and hopefully get some new ideas).

I reckon you should try a different field. If you're only here for a year use it to try something different.

OMG please tell me not everywhere's like that!! O_O"

Sorry, not sure where the idea came from that we are only here for a year, we have our PR and are planning to stay for a minimum of a few years and possibly for good if everything turns out OK. And yes, from our experience things are a lot like "Sorry if you don't have local experience we aren't interested", I can't tell you how many times my girlfriend has got that and I have had it a couple of times too, honestly how differently can things be run over here!! :curse:

If you did stuff for BAE have you thought about seeing what defence/aerospace work there is in Sydney.

There's a giant THALES sign stuck up in Melbourne - maybe they would also have a base in Sydney? A while back Thales owned ADI (Australian defence industries I believe) - maybe that would be worth a look.

What sort of software engineering did you do? If you did windows type stuff then you might want to look at banks and the services industries. If it's more embedded software then railways/anything that moves might be worth looking into.

To a certain extent, yes. It is a very common thing to come up against, and one way round it is to get ANY job you can at first, just so you can start getting Aussie stuff onto your Resume.

It took my electronics engineer husband 9 months to get a job here. He had 20 years experience in Canada but nobody here wanted to know about him because he had no "local" experience. He couldn't even get a job at Coles collecting trolleys. It took an interstate move to finally get work.

I thought BAe outsourced all their IT work?

@ Deutschmaster

Yeah I thought of contacting BAE and Thales and their equivalents but unfortunately for the main part you are not able to work for the defence companies unless you have citizenship (I say for the main part as I am sure there are people that get round this but I presume these people are very few and far between and have to be specialists that they can't get otherwise).

The idea of moving interstate has been crossing our minds, two things though, we both think we would really like it here and plus my girlfriend has a job which she really likes and is unlikely to get in any other city :-/ Could be a last possibility though

Defence work is going to be hard/impossible, as you need security clearance, and for that you have to be an Australian citizen.

Edit. Yep, you've got it Sigourner...

I still get told "no, sorry, we want someone with local experience," and I've got local experience!

Thales don't just do defence - they do all sorts of electronics and internet security. Perhaps you wouldn't need citizenship to do something less secretive.