I am leaving for Brisbane end of April with my wife and 2 kids on a residency. I am an IT consultant (SAP ABAP Technical, 11 years) and have started the task of looking for work.

I have looked at the usual web sites and there seems to be some work (bad time of the year I know) but if I contact any of the agents advertising they never seem to get back to me.

I am looking for contract work so don't expect to receive any offers until I am in the country ready to start but I am getting a bit paranoid with the lack of feedback. Is this normal, the typical Oz laid back way of life, or do you think they wont even start replying until I am in the country?

Any advise or reassurance would be very much appreciated.

My biggest piece of ADVICE IS USE TELEPHONE.

get the names and numbers of decision makers, and call them direct, the middle men dont wont to know, recruit consultants are useless unless you are very near a start date and actually there....then they do a shite job oin negotiation. for example is relocation included, remember a recruitment consultant can be paid many thousands of dallars if you worth your salt a company will pay you this for relocation...

just my experience and it works

I work for Rio Tinto in Perth but our IS&T department is based in Brisbane and that is where the vast majority of our SAP people are (ECC6 & BW). We just went through a major re-implementation but there is a new project to link it to other major systems kicking off. There are always jobs advertised internally so it might be worth sending them your cv when you arrive (I do not recommend doing it before).

You are unlikely to get responses whilst you are out of the country.

Thanks for all your comments.

Cheers

Hi ... I'm an IT contractor ... agree with moneypen ... I got zero response before I left the UK even though I was using seek, IT2, Careerone etc etc ... Soon as I got here and applied for contracts started to get agents calling back ... it might be worth phoning the contact details in the ads just before you leave the UK if you want to work straight away.

But if you're going to go the self employed route ie set up your own company and get an ABN / ACN ... you wont be able to do that until you have an address, id etc ... it's pretty quick after that though.

Cheers ... David

Yup. Getting blanked by agents and companies is very common here.

You need to get on the phone and talk. Often agents will want you to come to their offices for a chat before they put you forward for a job as they have limited CV submission.

If contracting you can work direct for the agency or setup your own company, but it does depend how long you will be doing it.

Often you will start as a contractor, and then they talk about offering you perm work.

They also the process of the application, and written responses to the role specification which can run into several pages.