From Relocation to Employment: Strategies for Career Success Abroad

Mastering Job Market Dynamics, Building Key Skills, and Expanding Your Professional Network

Are you moving from one country to another? From one city to another? It means, that the job market is different, and the tools and skill set might be slightly different. I hope your foundational knowledge of topics is on point and you aren't driven and distracted by marketing pitches and vendor buzzwords.

If you feel, you have a gap in foundational knowledge, you definitely would struggle in your career and you need someone who can save you money and time. Nowadays courses, training, certifications and even degrees won't help you to gain a job with a competitive salary.

The competition is high and you have to acquire a competitive advantage. This is all about the Surfalytics Community. It provides the environment for you to acquire a competitive advantage in the job market and boost your skills with the:

1. Soft Skills - help you to communicate with stakeholders and team

2. Hard Skills - actual skills for doing your job and doing it well

3. Interviewing Skills - help you to know what to expect on an interview and practice it, prepare you for Behavioural questions, interview frameworks, coding exercises and so on

4. Domain knowledge - just skills are not enough, they are required context to apply.

For example, knowledge of SQL and Tableau is not enough, you would need to understand what kind of data problem you are solving, who are stakeholders, what are their expectations and how can you help them with data, in other words, you would need to leverage Soft, Hard and Domain all together. Tricky job if you've never done this before or done poorly.

All of these apply to the interview, you should impress the hiring manager, and you have to demonstrate that you are aware of typical data problems (hiring manager pain points), and outline potential solutions and best practices in other words be proactive about the job role you are applied and proof that you are the right candidate.

Ok, let’s stay on track. Back to our main topic.

Assume, you are moved to a new place and you have to find a job. Obviously, it is too late. Even with my outstanding experience, I couldn't find a job fast. Nowadays, it might take 3-4 months easily.

You guess why? It is easy. Data jobs and skills aren't new and many people think it is easy money. Finish a couple courses, get a couple certifications, practice SQL and Python and you are good to go...Or I would say, you are good to apply for the job.

Imagine, there is one job posting for a Data Analyst role in Vancouver, BC. Desperate candidates will start to apply from all over the world. No one really checks the job descriptions and reads the requirements. Even if candidates have no Canadian working visa they still hope to get a shot for the interview. And they won't get one.

The challenge is that these folks block the attention of the recruiter. Imagine getting 500 applications in a couple days. As a result, a good Resume like yours even didn't come to the attention of HR.

Some claim, that you have to write cover letters, connect with HR on Linkedin and data folks from this company. But it is not proven. In Surfalytics, every week members share their interviewing progress and usually it takes at least a hundred applications, and a dozen interviews before the actual offer. And we don't have a silver bullet to overcome the challenge I've highlighted.

I mentioned that it is late to start job searching after your move. Same it is too late to search job if you lost one. (I will write another post about a good time to search for the job).

Let's now focus on an ideal scenario that can work for anyone. It covers the following use cases:

1. You are planning to move/migrate to a new country

2. You are moving to a new Province/State/City that might have different job market requirements

3. You already moved and stacked

4. You never had real work experience and are not sure where to start (not moving case, but the approach will help you a lot)

I don't know any other tool better than LinkedIn that will give you all the answers to all the questions related to your data career journey.

Let's try to brainstorm the questions and find the answers.

What are the prerequisites?

Often, folks buy my consultation and ask me to help them with their career and life choices. Everyone has multiple options at any single time and we might need someone to check from a different angle and help to make the right decision. I can do this well because I was there and I mostly share my perspective.

Your main goal is to decide WHERE you want to live and work. Don't think about temporary, think about the long term. What is the ideal place for you? I tend to believe that our minds are materialized. As soon, as you decide where you want to live and work, go to Linkedin and make a solid LinkedIn profile that will match your Resume.

A couple action items:

• Make sure you choose the city/country that you are planning to be in, even if you aren't there yet.

• Make sure your title/role for all positions is the same as you want to apply for and study.

This will help you establish networking connections with local folks and HR will see you as a potential candidate and this will increase the trust.

You have to clearly understand - if you are applying for a job that is in a foreign country and your resume/LinkedIn highlights that you don't have the right experience, and you aren't based in the same country where the job is, you probably will miss the opportunity. Our goal is to decrease some "red flags" for HR and Hiring Managers.

By job, I assume Data Analyst, Analytics Engineer, BI Developer, Data Engineer. This is what I am covering end to end across the world;)

To find the answers, we have to go to Linkedin and start searching for jobs. I hope you have a clear understanding of job roles. If not, you can check my Data Job Roadmap and overall Module 1 to learn about the fundamentals of Analytics.

Let's assume this is the role of a Data Analyst. In this case, we should also check the BI developer/Engineer. We already should know what a Data Analyst is doing and how this role adds value to the business.

Let's open 15-20 Job postings in the target Country/City and ideally, we can print them out. This will help us slowly read through and highlight the following information using a different colour:

• Domain (industry knowledge).

• Tools they use for BI, Data Warehouse, ETL. We should search for vendors’ names.

• Any reference about DevOps, CI/CD.

• Languages they want. I bet it is SQL and sometimes Python.

• Highlight the typical use cases. For example - "collect requirements from business stakeholders", "write documentation".

• Search for complementary data things like data quality, data catalogue, data contracts and so on.

• Check if is it Hybrid, Remote or in the office.

• Check for any compensation references.

After you read so many "similar" job postings you will see a pattern. Don't forget, you are a data person. And we just collected data, let's aggregate it in the spreadsheet and find out what is the most popular data stack.

Our goal always remains the same - 20% of efforts that will drive 80% of results. This analysis will do exactly this.

How to grow a "local" network?

Since your LinkedIn profile is based in the target country, you are good to go to start connecting with data folks and HR. For each company where you like the job description, data stack and overall company, you have to search for HR/Recruiters folks and connect with them as well as potential hiring managers such as Managers and directors of Data Analytics teams.

In addition, you can overall connect with local folks and try to connect with them. Should be fairly simple. You can tell them that you are new in the area and not sure how things work and can ask for tips.

If you can find that they are active on Linkedin, do not hesitate to like and comment on their post, this will help to establish trust and who knows, maybe you will work together in the future;)

What is the fair compensation?

Based on the last exercises, we collected some data from job postings and we connected with local engineers and analysts. This can help. There are other places like:
- Team blind
- levels.fyi
- glassdoor
And probably some others.

If we have the data, we should answer about the ideal tech stack of the most popular. For Data Analyst roles we should know:

• What is the most popular BI?

• What is the most popular Data Warehouse platform?

• What is the most popular public cloud vendor?

• What is the most popular language? (Obviously SQL)

• How do they transform the data and do they use dbt?

• What are other important skills to have? (Git?)
  

What are the names of companies who actively hiring?

This analysis will show you that some companies are hiring more often than others, try to identify companies with healthy data culture and data teams. It is easy to do. If the job description is clear and the company is using modern data tools, obviously they will pay well and the team would be great.

If a company has a legacy (old) data framework, running analytics on the premise with a spreadsheet or an old stack like Microsoft Reporting Service obviously this is not a good choice.

What are the fresh jobs?

I don't know did you have noticed already or not, but reading job applications and deriving the most important information is quite a good skill that will help you a lot. Try to make this your daily/weekly routine. You can simply set up Job Alerts and get all new jobs. Continue to review job applications, better understand the market requirements, networking with folks. In other words, you are creating great product-market fit where you are product=)

Can I actually practice the interview?

Yes! You have to practice the interview. you linkedin and resume are already based on the target destination. Why not leverage them and assume we are already living in this country or will live soon.

Apply for all jobs and try to attend interviews. This is your source of real feedback. You will practice your story and identify the gap. Every interview failure is a big win. You can think about sports competitions. The athletes say - that 1 real competition is worth many hours of practice.

How to get a competitive advantage aka what to do with all of this?

I hope you got the idea. You have to create an ideal profile on Linkedin and Resume, move virtually to the desired location and do a deep dive into the job postings to understand where your focus should be and what kind of pet projects you have to do.

Don't hesitate to attend Mock and SQL interview practices at Surfalytics or watch on YouTube.

This approach helped me a lot and will help you! Good luck!