Find work with accommodation abroad

Advice on how to get the most out of your experience working abroad

1. Pick the country you go to carefully.

The first advice we have for you when you go to work abroad is to carefully select the country you will spend some time of your life in. Set a goal for yourself and pick the country that is the most likely to fulfill that goal. If your goal is to save as much money as possible by working abroad, check what salaries are paid. And next to salary, check how expensive your cost of living will be. Your savings each month will depend on those two factors mainly.

Other factors that will help you choose a country to work could be:
Do you know the country first hand? What attracts you to the state, and do you have friends who have had good working experiences?
How easy and affordable it is to travel to that specific country so that you can travel home once in a while. What quality of life can you expect to be a foreigner in that country? A good starting point is checking the quality of life index. Is there an active international community that can help you adapt faster to the new country?

2. The grass is not always greener abroad.

You might have created the perception that everything abroad is better than at home, especially for those going for the first time to work and live abroad. We can tell you already, it’s not! Nowhere you will feel as well as at home. The environment that is familiar to you and doesn’t take you energy to adapt to. Yes, when going to work abroad, certain things are likely to be of higher standards as you are used to.

Expect good healthcare, friendly people, and excellent infrastructure to move around. But working abroad doesn’t mean a trip to paradise. You will need to work hard, live with people that are hard to understand for you, and not get along well with. Suppose you are ready for a significant change and are motivated for a new challenge abroad. In that case, Robin will be there to help you and make sure this step goes as comfortably as possible.

3. Set a long term goal

Think for yourself the main reason to go to work abroad and design the path towards that goal. Otherwise, you might waste a lot of energy jumping from one place to the next without having any savings in your bank account as a result. An excellent example of a goal is to earn as much money as possible during your time abroad. Another example could be to escape your current life or get as much out of the experience abroad.
According to the goal you set for yourself, you can make decisions on where and how you would like to work:

• Go to work with a friend or alone;
• Go to work in the Netherlands f.e. Or Germany or Belgium.
• How you long you would like to go abroad
• If you like a stable job or prefer to have flexible jobs

Speak to Robin’s job expert and let us know why you plan to go to work abroad. Together we can decide what job offer will be the most suitable for you.

4. Make sure you can speak to locals.

Expect to work abroad 40 hours per week. This means you will spend more of your time living abroad than working abroad. To get the most out of your experience living abroad, make sure you can communicate with locals. For example, in the Netherlands and Belgium, around 90% of the locals can hold a conversation in English. Speaking English will help you communicate at work, meet people on the street, ask for help, and talk to the salesperson in the shop that approaches you. Who knows, you will end up with some new local friends that will show you all the best things the country has to offer.

In Germany, fewer people speak English, so we recommend it for people planning to work in Germany to learn at least the German language basics.

5. Go abroad with somebody else, preferably that was living abroad already

Going to work and living abroad has a significant impact on your life. Especially if you go for the first time to work overseas, we recommend you to go together with somebody else. If possible, with someone that has spent some time abroad already. Someone that knows their way around and creates calm in a rather stressful situation.

Don’t worry about those who don’t mind the challenges or even prefer to go alone to work abroad. The Robins job experts will find work for you and take care of people similar to you, coming from the same country. This makes it easier for you to adapt. Actually, for Robin, it’s easier to find work for people going to work abroad alone. An advantage of going alone is that you will be more exposed to other people. This will force you to search for new contacts. These contacts might become valuable friends in the future. Soon you’ll realize that the country you come from doesn’t matter that much. Being a foreigner abroad connects you to other foreigners similar to you, who left their homeland to find work elsewhere.

6. Prepare a good CV

Why prepare a good C.V. you might wonder when you go to work, such as an order picker or a production worker in the Netherlands or Germany. To be honest, Robin doesn’t put a lot of value into C.V.’s either. Still, many companies that start working with foreign personnel would like to see at least the last employment, to create some security that you are the right fit for the job. If you worked all your life in the office, for example, some companies might doubt that you will be the right pick as an order picker, for example.

To leave all your options open for you, we recommend spending some time putting your work experience together into a C.V. Even the smallest details might broaden the opportunities for you to get a job abroad. If you don’t know where to start, there are many free CV writing tools available. An example is https://www.visualcv.com/. If you are still stuck, let Robin’s job expert know. For motivated people, we are glad to assist in writing the C.V., and this, just like all Robins’ services, free of charge.