nhamilton

My husband and I (both IT professionals) are re-locating our family to Canberra in April this year and would appreciate any advice on job-hunting in the IT sector.

We've both been working for large investment banks for more than 10yrs (not the core industry sector we're expecting in Canberra), but generally on large-scale projects. We're not fussy about industry and would happily work on smaller projects or for smaller companies.

Any recommended websites, agencies? Are roles contract, perm or evenly split? For contract - how does this work in Aus? Do people use umbrella companies or have their own limited company?

Key skills:
myself - Oracle databases, data warehousing, ETL, full lifecyle development and team leading
husband - Sybase, Unix and getting into C# development

Any advice would be much appreciated!

ossigeno

Website is http://it.seek.com.au/

Only tangible IT work in Canberra is for government departments.

Most government departments require citizenship, a few will allow PR.

You can use similar structures as UK: own company, trust or umbrella. Agents will try to push you into a structure they are getting a fee from - usually a management company/umbrella.

No IR35 but they do have personal services legislation. One test of which is 80:20 rule.

We had a wonderful Englishman come over and make recommendations on the decimating the use of IT contractors. Review of the Australian Government's Use of Information and Communication Technology. Departments are adopting this review.

freebo

First place to look is www.seek.com.au, what little I saw a lot of jobs in ACT required citizenship rather than just PR, I'm in a simiar field to your husband.

nhamilton

Thanks for the web references - will take a look straight away.

We both have dual citizenship (french/australian and british/australian) so hopefully should be ok for government work.

ossigeno

The relevant Gershon point in the review summary: "..Reduce the total number of ICT contractors in use across FMA Act agencies by 50% over a 2-year period and increase the number of APS ICT staff. This should save the Government an estimated $100 million (across both BAU and project-related work)..."

quoll

And the wheel goes round and round, who'd have thought it? It was only 5 years ago or so that the government outsourced all its IT!

If you have Aus citizenship you should be OK for government jobs. Without it you might get into ACT government as they only specify PR. There are loads of recruitment agencies around (a quick google will give you a list) and if you approach a few you can see what is available.

The Gazette is the place to go for APS jobs http://www.apsjobs.gov.au/

mohogony

The main employer in Canberra is the Australian governement which requires citizenship .