Moving across the world and just hoping for the best.
A little bit about me.
I come from Australia, and like all Australian’s I have planned to travel since the day of my birth. I’ve been living in Melbourne for the last 5 years doing a mixture of studying, working and exploring.
While I was studying to get my undergrad in Communication Design, I worked in every kind of job. I have been the check-out chick and the retail assistant; I did my stint as a customer service rep in a call centre before taking a very big leap to start freelancing in design.
I took any job I could, anything that related loosely to design. So loosely that my first job I got actually listed me as a ‘PowerPoint specialist’. I like to think of this time as paying my dues to the industry. You needed coffee; I got coffee, you need an icon for a complicated concept; I got it, you need me to spend 4 days making thousands of words fit on one PowerPoint slide; I was your girl.
After all that fun learning and working, I needed an adventure. I decide to do an exchange semester and ended up at the University of Leeds for 6 months. I then was lucky enough to score a position at IBM iX as UX/UI designer. The world of IBM and enterprise level clients and projects was an entirely new world for me. I was thrown in the deep end and it was liberating and terrifying.
Fast forward a year and the need to change things up hit me once again. The stars had aligned, and I applied for my visa to come to the UK!
As lucky as I am to hold an Australian Passport I also had to consider where I was able to get a work visa, it meant I ended up considering Canada and the UK. London was a clear choice; my sister had been telling me for years about her escapades when she lived in London in her early twenties and how she would have married a stranger on the street to stay if she could have. The industry is one of the biggest in the world and there are heaps of opportunities whatever direction I wanted to take. The world was literally at my feet.
So now with my history nice and neatly detailed I want to write about what I did to make the move how I was incredibly lucky to score an awesome job within 2 weeks of landing and how I am already infiltrating the very cool industry here across the pond.
My visa in hand and nothing else:
At this point, I was utterly overwhelmed (a continuing theme you will find). I had all the logistics down. I had planned everything I could and handed in my notice at work, there was no turning back.
Within my last weeks at work, my friend turns to me and says:
“you know there is this slack group, it called Candles. You should join”
I replied, “oh, what’s it for?”
“It’s a little of everything, jobs, advice, networking, tools, feedback. It’s run by a guy called Tom Cotterill”
As I start to google, I realised I had already connected with him on LinkedIn. I had added him during a bulk add of anyone in London that seemed loosely related to design.
From there I spent a solid couple of hours a week simply reading through the threads on Candles sussing out the vibes and vocab being used and recognising who the key players were.
Beyond that, I also spent a great deal of time googling very stupid things like ‘How to move overseas?’ and ‘How to get a job in another country when you don’t know anything or anyone?’. Not surprisingly the answers google provided me with were wikihow quality answers like… to get a job you must first apply for a job. And while I admit that they were not wrong; the words did not reassure me or alleviate my overwhelmed feeling.
As my departure date started to creep closer, I started to actually apply for roles. I had a series of calls with recruiters asking obvious but necessary questions about what the industry in London is like? What’s the money like? And should I be expecting to take a step backwards in my next role?
These calls definitely helped me and also started to turn my panic into excitement, the possibilities were real. I was determined to cliché my way off the plane and ‘hit the ground running’. I had spent hours and hours researching the coolest agencies in London, who was the most innovative, who had the best clients etc… trying to understand the market.
At this point, I tended towards over planning, over thinking, over…everything and it was not doing me any favours. However, when talking to my mother just one week before I left a very wise piece of advice was imparted on me. ‘There are no rules’ she said…this is now the mantra of my entire move. There is not one direction that I have to follow, no job that I have to take, no area that I have to live in. I have the power to make all my own choices even if I don’t know what the choices are yet!
I boarded the plane with that in mind. Not ready at all! but at least I had a mantra, right?
Week One in London.
After sleeping off my jetlag I had 3 interviews scheduled. All the roles where different. One was for a small startup working in a team of three, the other for an international agency working in the team of 20+.
In the 2nd stages of both I was required to do a design task. I have mixed feelings about design tasks, but I still do them. One was a huge brief that required over a day’s work, the other only a few hours. One had clear expected deliverables, the other a loose concept. They were quite similar to the ones I had experienced in Australia.
Whatever country you are in you can’t predict if you are going to get a task, how big it will be, if it will be well written, or if you have the suspicion that you are just getting ripped off for free work. For me I will always take it on a case by case basis.
Week Two in London.
Week two hit and I was still running on adrenaline and feeling good. By my calculations I had 15 appointments for jobs. A mixture of calls and face to face meetings. It was exhausting, but also unbelievably exciting. I had never received this kind of response while in Australia. If London had open flood gates, then Melbourne had a slow dripping tap in comparison.
By the end of the week, I had received 2 offers but I was also in the middle of the process with my first choice. I told them that I had an offer and I needed to give them an answer by Friday. To my surprise they completely understood. They had decided that I had performed well enough in the interview that I didn’t need to do the design task (A response I loved. I respected that they also approached design tasks on a case by case basis). I received an offer in the late afternoon on the Friday and I was ecstatic. The entire process for that role took 3 days.
I accepted the role and then the world seemly stood still! All the rushing and worrying and preparing answers about what is my biggest weakness was over.
What’s happening now.
The adrenaline has now worn off, I got sick and spent a week in bed and in another week, I start my new job.
That is where I am now, sitting quietly waiting for my new London life to start. Excited and still overwhelmed.
Even with my one month of experience I still recommend the move. The response of the community here has been amazing, everyone actually does want to grab a coffee with you and hear about your background.
My advice would be to embrace the fact that it will be overwhelming, it will be hard. But that the things that challenge us are usually the most rewarding. And lastly to quote the wise words of my mother, remember that there are no rules, none at all.
