Rete

You don't have the qualifications for a work visa. No company can sponsor you with the required qualifications, i.e. a true college degree, (masters, bachelors), work experience and the field of employment has to be on the list of acceptable fields of employment.

As Nutmegger pointed out, Jerseygirl gave you the link to Pulaski's Way and if you had read it, you would see that you don't fit any of those ways that are listed.

The US is one of the most difficult countries to emigrate to and unfortunately, unless you can pay for your education upfront, even a simple F1 student visa is out of your grasp. Go back uni in the UK and study a field that is on the prescribed list, get your degree and work experience and perhaps then you will find a sponsor.

Noorah101

Advice: Get further educated in the UK. Get a degree. Get a job with a company that has offices in the USA. Work your way up the chain until you qualify for a transfer to the USA.

No one is saying flat out that it can never be done. We are saying it can't be done "at this time" because you don't qualify. Make this a 7 to 10 year plan, and it might just work out.

Rene

BenK91

Not sure if anyone else has said it but I had my national diploma transcribed to an Associates Degree here.

Rete

And how much did that really help you, Ben? And what field are you in? If you were to go on to study in the US, how many credits will a college allow you for this associates degree?

The bottom line is an associate's degree will not qualify him for a work visa.

BenK91

notaclue

In short, you are looking at a 7-10 time scale IF you take the right steps to move here. I arrived as a student on an F1 visa and was lucky that I found my other half and ended up getting married. Alabama is not exactly removing yourself from the big city life - I could say I live away from the big city life because I live in a rural setting but still only 20 minutes away from a massive city.

Also worth noting that a large chunk of country life hovers closer to poverty unless we're talking Texas ranch style.

If you come over as a student you need to consider what you do at the end of that process - You can't 'just stay'. Whilst this is possible, it isn't easy and you are severely limited in your prospects of getting a job or even a drivers license. At one point I was eating bargain basement food and I was living rent free and was on top of my finances.

As others have stated your alternative is to hang back, get well educated (lets look at a 4 year degree), get hired with a global company, into a management position then ask for a transfer.

As you can see, it's possible, but not easy.

Your UK qualifications whether diploma (which they sound like a 1 year college course) or better still do not qualify you to emigrate here via an employer. Your electrical qualifications (I have the same diploma/HNC you do) would not stand up here as it is a very different beast all together. There is no such thing as a ring circuit - radial all the way!

carcajou

OP has no chance outside of marrying an American, and 7-10 year plans are also unrealistic because of how much visa regulations and political climates can change. Impossible to forecast and shouldn't rely on today's trends being a baseline for a decade from now. Just, live your life in the UK and periodically check in to see if trends have changed. If you read Pulaski's Ways you will know that even if a company wants to sponsor you that is no guarantee you will be coming to the US. The attitude of "all I need is a company to sponsor me" makes it seem that you don't really understand the migration process to the US.

Otherwise, building on the previous post, I have been through Alabama many times. It is a very poor state. I used to say, the stereotypes people apply to Mississippi, actually apply more in Alabama.

But, also notaclue is correct that Alabama isn't really removed from "city life" (notaclue, do you live there?). Birmingham has over a million people, and used to be called "the Pittsburgh of the South" because of all the heavy industry there. Mobile has about half a million (but, with over a million within an hour's drive), Montgomery is near half a million and so is Huntsville. There are also two "college towns" with huge public universities in the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa) and Auburn (in the town of Auburn, on the Georgia state line). It isn't any more rural than Pennsylvania outside the two big cities, Illinois outside the Chicago area or many other states.

Canada or Australia may have areas that fit your idea of "rural" more closely, and may be easier to get into.

neill

Oh there's people who would employ you down here. There's two things you have to overcome before you can even "move" and turn up at the US border:

1) That a company would be in such a position that it was unable to fill the vacancy locally, regionally or even nationally that they would sponsor you for a very expensive work visa;
2) That USCIS would approve your skills / experience for the relevant work visa and then you enter a lottery where you have about a 30% chance of even getting said visa.

I don't know if it's really been said in this thread, but unfortunately, unlike Canada or Aus, you cannot sponsor yourself. This is the principal reason why it is so difficult to move to the USA based on employment, even with great skills.

moneypenny20

Not sure has what the OP is looking for but he doesn't have the skills required to get in here either.

chawkins99

The population of Birmingham is actually around 200,000. The population of the metro Birmingham area may be around 1 million. In contrast, the population of the other Birmingham (UK) is over 1 million. Metro Birmingham which would cover places like Dudley, Wolverhampton, Solihull, Sutton Coldfield, etc is probably closer to 4 million.

I lived for 10 years in Alabama in a small town 30 miles south of Birmingham. A statistic I would quote for comparison is that England and Alabama are roughly the same size geographically but Alabama has less than one tenth the population. There are plenty of places off the beaten track, and yes, most of them are very poor. Oh, and I also spent my first 30 years in Birmingham (England).

SanDiegogirl

Basically, you have to find an employer who will sponsor you for a work visa. As said, the employer has to spend time and money to do this so they are looking for people with specific skills (engineering, IT, finance etc) and with experience. To obtain the most common visa - an H-1b - one needs a degree, so not all jobs qualify for a work visa.

If you want to go to college in the US then you need to finance it yourself and get an F1 visa.

robtuck

First, the Diploma level might be important. Contrary to some opinions, the non traditional route in the UK does not just mean "Trades". For example, I gained a Higher National Diploma in Business & Finance. It probably translates to somewhere between an Associates and Batchelors Degree in the USA system.

Why? Because studying is a potential route over, if that is the primary goal. You have a couple of options - the most likely being F1 Visa, which will require you can show funding for the course. The other would be a UK University with a placement scheme in place for the USA - my daughter is currently starting out in the College system and is currently boarding with lots of students doing precisely this - they come over for a full year, usually towards the end of their degree, on the F1 Visa. That Visa does allow some limited on campus work, but it won't allow you to work off campus. There are then some options, difficult ones, to extend your stay post education - but is is better than no chance at all.

The other options - the Diploma may get you a job above entry level in the UK. Identify potential employers who have a USA base. Target getting a job here in a role that would qualify down the road for an L1B Visa, or, if you want to wait a bit longer, L1A (Manager level). This is longer term, and there are no guarantees, but the route is possible. I used this route myself, gaining an L1A Visa, deciding to make the move three years after moving into the company (but had a number of years of prior experience to enable the move).

Alabama - it's a big State, with some very different areas. Living next door, and working on the border, it has some "quirks", but then again I live in metro Atlanta, enjoying the busier lifestyle, but ten miles from is a Confederate Sons of the South Billboard and miles of rural Georgia.

robtuck

Oh, forgot one other College related route - any good at sports? Some smaller, up and coming Colleges can offer scholarships - I bumped into a UK student who had come over to California originally for College and then got a full scholarship at Point University in Georgia because he was good at football. He seemed to have lots of Brazilian classmates doing the same thing (to be fair, they did come from Youth teams in the Brazilian top league)

Rete

What is some where between an Associate's Degree and a Bachelor's Degree? All there is between the two are class credits. Normally 3 credits per class. An associate's is 60 credits. A bachelor's is 120 credits. So if you have 90 credits you might have enough to get an associate's degree but are lacking 30 credits (10 classes) for a bachelor's. So you lock into the associate's degree. Now you have 30 unused credits to your name from your first university/college and transfer to another school. Not all those 30 credits will be accepted by the new college/university. Only 15 might be so you have lost 15 credits or 5 classes that need to be retaken.

Besides an Associate's Degree is useless in qualifying for a work visa. He isn't interested in a long term goal. Your scenario has already been presented to him and turned down. I'm in a neighboring state to Alabama. I like AL a hell of a lot better than MS and even GA. AL has a lot going for it and yes, there are rural areas to live in and some of them are within a 25 minute from my house in MS. We don't know what the OP considers rural. To my husband that is looking out the window and being unable to see your neighbor. To him it might be the same or having to drive 60 miles to the next big city to go to work.

P.S. I studied business and finance in a US high school and it was considered as skills needed for office work. They are also subjects taught in business colleges which only offer 2 year associate degrees.

robtuck

A HND or HNC (Certificate) has no direct comparison in the USA system - it would depend on the College and how they translate it. In some locations you may get lucky and find they count it as a Batchelors, in others they may decide it does not meet that criteria and falls down to an Associates. The UK system is very different - some Colleges over here will translate a good set of GCSE results as sufficient to match a High School Diploma. You then get AS and A Level qualifications - similar to AP classes - but in some cases much more advanced. The UK has multiple streams from the age of 14 and some are very different to the USA approach (not saying better or worse, just different) and they are not always separated by academia and trades.

My HND required 32 modules to be completed, each getting a grade of Fail, Pass, Merit or Distinction and needing between 16 and 20 hours of lectures per week. The entire Diploma focused on Business and Finance related subject matter, and was sufficient to provide credits towards professional Accountancy qualifications in the UK. Even then, depending on the qualification, you got different levels of credit for the course - so if the UK can't decide precisely where it sits, I doubt the USA has a defined process. From my experience since, and exposure to the USA education system (limited to GA), I'd have the course I studied on a par with a Batchelors, but not every HND is created equal - certainly at a course content level.

The short version - it's not easily translated into Credits/GPA - it would be subjective.

My daughter is experiencing this right now - some of her GCSE class work is of a higher level than her first year Degree at College, to the point where she has been advised she does not need to attend classes in one subject. There is supposed to be an International standard for transferring points at College level, but it's not always clear cut where the courses don't match well. At High School we had to spend weeks working with the School to translate her grades into credits and a GPA.

My point was that College may be a route over as a result - it becomes a game of targeting the right institutions. That might at least offer a temporary chance to live in the USA, and if it does confirm a desire to make a move more long term, it might provide sufficient motivation to do the hard work needed for a longer term stay.