I have taken a £8000 pay cut to move back to Canada but we will still be better off in Canada than the UK. The UK simply has no gravity, it just sucks!

The difference is they would be graduates of a canadian university, with canadian experience and contacts made through internships etc, so its not really comparing apples to apples. Congrats on the job, hopefully now you are on the ladder your ability and experience will propel you upwards like it did for Glaswegian.

My new job pays $35k per year and I have 15 yrs experience and a PhD!

I can read this two ways. You may be saying you earn more than $20,000 or you think $35,000 is good for a graduate whatever the experience or qualification level.

I know many graduates on poor money simply because they are in fields that do not command good pay. I also know many who have little or no qualifications who earn shit loads of money.

For my kids all I can do is guide them into what one hopes are good careers and then its up to them...money may or may not come with job satisfaction and if you find life a little easier it does not matter quite so much me thinks...

Came across this

Make your own mind up really as stats and lies I am told...

http://money.cnn.com/pf/features/pop...ing/popup.html

and this link that goes with it

http://money.cnn.com/2004/06/11/pf/c...iving/?cnn=yes

Apologies, I thought you meant they're graduates from a UK university!
A lot of Brits think they'll just be able to move seemlessly from Britain to Canada with no change in financial status whatsoever.
The number of times I've seen 'I expect to earn $50k', 'I will accept $35k' etc. For many it's minimum wage!!
They wouldn't expect this if they moved to Italy or Spain, so why Canada? Is it because it's largely English speaking?

Thanks,
I feel much more positive now I've finally broken the barrier and got a job here. I was beginning to think I'd never ever get work in Canada!!
Hopefully now I'm working full time here employers will view me more seriously instead of just a British immigrant!

The richest man I've met has a grade six education -- ie, he left school when he was 11 . A lot of people attribute his financial success to his lack of formal education - he just didn't think about stuff like 'is this a right decision?', 'what are the risks?' etc. too much, if at all! He just did stuff. He's a bit of an assh@le as well so that too probably helped him 'succeed' .

This gives a good demonstration of price comparisons within Canada. Last Summer we sold our old and rather ugly 3-bedroom townhouse in Oakville for $225,000. As you must be aware, GTR, that is towards the bottom of the price range for Oakville. We then bought a fairly new 3-bedroom detached house in Gatineau. Lots of upgrades, nice garden, finished basement and in the best part of town. $171,000. Sure, municipal and personal taxes are higher in Quebec, but you do get a lot back. We can afford to send our son to private school (subsidised by the provincial government).

I think you have to look at Toronto and anywhere you can commute to Toronto from in the GTA like Oakville as a completely seperate case to the rest of Canada, excluding Vancouver which is just as, if not more, expensive. It's like London and the south East in the UK. For example in the area I rent my apartment in Bloor West Village in the west end of Toronto near high Park the cheapest house I have seen on the market recently is $425,000. that's for a 4 (maybe 3 but I think 4) bedroom detached house with space for a car. Nice area but on a main road. That's the cheapest, most are over $500,000 and this isn't like a super rich area like Rosedale or Forest Hill where there's nothing under a million dollars. Compare that to anywhere outside the GTA or Vancouver and it just makes me want to cry, hehe. I hate renting and giving my money to the landlord rather than building equity but unless I either hit lucky on the handfull of slightly cheaper properties in this area or move to a crappy area of the city I'm stuck. I'd love to move say to the Quinte region or Southern Ontario etc. where you can buy fantastic property for hald the price of Toronto, however to live there you need a job there and that's the catch 22 because most of the jobs are Toronto centric which is why so many people spend hours a day commuting because they want to live outside the city but are forced to commute back to it. There really is a huge cost of living difference between large metropolitan hubs like Toronto and Vancouver and smaller cities and towns in Canada.

On the job market front one thing that I always try and bear in mind is that Canada is a tiny country that happens to occupy a huge expanse of land. By that I mean the population is only 30,million. Compare that to the UK population of 60 million on a tiny Island or the USA with it's (just under) 300,000,000 people. That's 10 times the population of Canada in slightly less space. So lets say the US has an unemployment rate of 5%. That's 15 million people out of work. That's half the entire population of Canada. If Canada has an unemployment rate of 7% that's around 2 million people. So the US would have to create 7 times as many jobs as Canada to employ all it's people. in that respect I think that while Canada relies on immigrants to maintain it's workforce due to small population and low birth rates (like most of the western world) you have to bear in mind it is a small job market and that there are a large amount of Canadian graduates etc. heading into the professional and skilled jobs. That means that there will be a whole bunch of people applying for all these jobs and the people who were raised and educated in Canada, who know Canada and the way it works and have the friends and networks etc. are going to have an advantage. Just like a UK graduate who had done work experience or placements with a UK company would have an advantage over someone from Canada who just moved to the UK.

I think that people from the UK or USA or Australia etc. have a slight advantage over the majority of migrants in that their native language is english so there is less of a communications issue. It's still an issue, especially if you have a heavy accent, because you can still be mis understood and have problems getting points across when using unfamilar language or slang etc. However it is still an advantage over someone who has english as a second language.

I think the main thing is getting over that by proving yourself. You may have to start in a position below your experience or qualifications. However once you have a job you are there and doing something and you have the option of exercise your skills and impress people. If you truely are qualified above the level of work you are doing then you will be able to easily excel and surpass expectations and make impressions on people. The job I took when I first came was for $9/hr helping out in an office and I only found that through a family contact (networking is everything here). I thought it would be temporary while I tried to find a "real" job using my technical degree etc. However I soon realised the IT market was screwed and all the local graduates with their work placements etc. had the easier route and so I concentrated on making my temporary job into a "real" job as it were. I found that once you actually had the job then your qualifications became alsmost irrelevant, no one looks much at your resume once you are hired. It comes down to performance in the job and real world results. So I just usedc what I had learned at university etc. used my IT skills to impress all the technically inept people in most offices and did a good job and that was enough to skip past the temporary job thing and be taken seriously. Now after 2 years (which may seem a long time but isn't really) I've managed to get a decent position in the same company and set things up to either stay there or if I chose to leave I have 2 years of good "Canadian Experience" on my resume which should help diffuse the whole immigrant thing in the eyes of future employers.
All I am trying to say is don't overlook those temporary or crappy paid jobs because every company has opertunities for moving up or to different departments or work areas and if you can stick with it and prove your true skills then you will soon be treated like every other employee whether they were born/educated in Canada or not.

I think where I work there are people from around 40 different countries, probably more. It also helps having a US parent company because all the guys there are American and so to them everyone is a foreigner whether you are Canadian or British or South American etc. So that kind of evens the playing field.

Drew