Glad to hear you've been around Canada, it does give you a different perspective on the country. I too have travelled around Canada, and there are some places that I definately wouldn't want to settle in, for the same reason that you mentioned, but tell me a country that doesn't have these issues. All I was trying to say was that cost of living, standard of living can be achieved in the smaller communities.

Joking aside, is it any different in the UK? you live where you can work, or you commute for hours. A former colleague of mine had lived in Canada a few years ago, and highly recommended Kelowna to me, but when I looked on the net for jobs in the area, in my field, they were in short supply.

How much dosh you bring with you, how you spend it and what opportunities you find to earn a crust are all big factors in how much you will enjoy your Canadian experience.

Amen to that!

What line of job are you in?

I'm in IT, (banking software), but I have worked in BioInformatics.

Hmmm ... not many software companies in the smaller towns ... people like to meet company reps before they buy the software, so you have to be close to the customers.

Missisauga has a high concentration of IT companies serving Toronto as a result.

Canadian businesses haven't really got into moving out of the large population centres yet ... the closest we've got is a couple of the big oil & gas companies moving from Toronto to Calgary.

Looking on Monster etc, Alberta has the second highest number of IT related vacancies after Toronto, or at least it did when I last checked a few months ago. Personally I'm not attracted to the big, big cities, so Toronto was out for me. I dislike like currently having to work in London, so I can't see much benefit for me at least, in zooming half way around the world to swap one major city for another. Besides, I hear asthma sufferers have problems with smog in Toronto, and since I do suffer occaisional problems with that, I'd hate for it to become a regular problem.

There are a lot of IT jobs in Calgary - we have a lot of corporate headquarters - the real problem is landing one without Canadian experience.

It's certainly nothing like London or Toronto.

Seeing that you had heard a lot of positive remarks about Kelowna but unsure about the job situation, check the website www.jobskelowna.com

I do know for certain that there are often vacancies for IT jobs as through my line of work as a relocation consultant, I have to make it my business to be aware most of the time, of the job situation and who's hiring and who's firing.

That's good and bad to hear. Still I might be lucky and not get caught in the Canadian experience trap (my stab at optimism ). One of our clients is a large Canadian organisation, so if I can work my way onto that project when we kick off doing the work, that may help me a little.

Give me a second while I stop laughing ....

You really never can tell ... I had no problems getting interviews when I first came here, I just took a while for an interviewer to take a shine to me ... in the end I was second choice for the first job I got.

I also work with a guy who got a job straight off the plane ... then again, he did know someone who had worked for the company for a few years.

You pay your money, you take your chance ... if you're any good, someone will spot it sooner or later and you're away!!

A lot depends on how quickly you can adapt to the "Canadian way of doing things" ... don't ask me what that actually means ... I've been told that I've done it, so in theory I should know, but I don't.

I made you laugh, surely that's worth some karma ??

I think at the moment I have some very good skills to offer, but well have to see if I can stay as employable as I am by the time I land. Think that's going to be a lot of homework, as my currently employer isn't a patch on my last for doing useful stuff for your resume.

I'm hoping the "Canadian Way" just means going to Tim Horton's instead of Starbucks, and watching hockey not football!

On the job front, it may help to look at it this way: as a foreigner being assessed against Canadian job candidates, you have absolutely nothing to offer a Canadian employer except unwanted risk and uninvited diversity. That's how they see it, and not without reason.

But of course, we all know that we are special. We are good immigrants. Valuable. With ample skills to contribute. And we did A-levels, which means we must be cleverer than all of the Canadians. But how do we prove all of this to an employer that sees nothing but pain-in-the-arse all over our rambling resumes?

I don't know. It's like all the other catch-22s in life: getting your first job when all the jobs want experience, getting credit when you don't have any credit history...somehow, you find someone who'll give you a break. And once you've done that it's plain sailing. I think that's how it is with the Canadian experience catch-22.

If this "local experience" hurdle is more difficult to overcome than in other countries, I would say that is purely a function of Canada's high unemployment rate, which is the highest - by a good margin - in the English-speaking world. Lots of qualified Canadians can't find jobs.

That's an interesting way of looking at it, but I'm wouldn't say I was cleverer than a Canadian, or necessarily better educated. In my experience of the IT industry it's previous experience that counts for everything. If you have a few years in a particular area, you are instantly more employable than a someone without it. In companies I've worked for in the UK, we have had figures of up to 50% foreign employees, just because they had skill levels we could not match with domestic labour. Maybe it's a touch of xenophobia, and UK employers are just not protective of their own whereas Canadian ones are, I don't know?

All I can hope for is a lucky break as you say, and to make sure my skills are the ones demanded by the employers.