Tips for working in Australia

Criminal history checks: These take at least a month to be processed in NZ now, if left till you are at contract stage of the application process, this can dilute the process quite dramatically. I would suggest that once people have landed in Australia that they put through a request to the ministry of justice straight away, that way they can have it on hand if applying for a role that requires it. This could have caused me massive headaches and I thought it was going to, to be honest. Luckily I am in the contract process with a government department who can go directly to the NZ Police, which is far quicker. That one had me very worried.

The criminal history check has been quite a long winded process to procure, even though I am going to be working for the government who has a backdoor into the NZ Police vetting system! Definitely highly recommend that vetting request process getting off to an early start more than ever now! It has meant that I could have started my new role probably 2-3 weeks ago, which equals $$$$$$$$.

CV and career advice: I have found that recruiters have slightly different expectations in Australia in terms of CV format and even the process of applying for jobs. While I had a really good CV that worked very well for me in NZ, it wasn't so much the case in Australia. After speaking to a few recruiters (which was a hard enough process in itself) I had to change my layout. In the end I started to research career coaches and initiated a couple to try them out. One was pretty bad, an inexperienced one. The other was absolutely brilliant and helped me to be much more competitive in the local market, this was a much more experienced coach. The local knowledge aspect really helped with my CV, areas to target and approach. I wish I had done that the minute I landed here.

I tried a couple of different career coaches, one amazing the other pretty rubbish. I also went through pricing for a lot of different coaches and the one that I found excellent, was actually cheaper in certain than most of the others I found through Google. She does the executive side up, but her team would probably do other types of roles too. Her name is Roisin Duffy and her company is Bluesky Careers. I found her to be absolutely brilliant and will keep a relationship with her as long as I am over here, she is very knowledgeable and has a very strong finger on the Brisbane pulse, but also Australia in general. In NZ I was working in a different market and I have gone through a career change over here, this is what ultimately initiated the need to change my CV. But after consultation it seemed that my core CV that was seen as really good by recruiters in NZ really needed its game lifted for the Australian market to get ahead. After getting it sorted out my hit rate was far superior to prior to this, after formatting and improving the content. I guess that even though we are only separated by a body of water, the markets are different and the markets here are pretty competitive. A lot of my friends here agree though that once you get your first role things are a lot easier, it's just that initial first job hurdle. Roisin helped not only my CV and approach with cover letter, but also self confidence and strategy for interviewing. The bulk of this was only done in two sessions as well, which is pretty cheap by market standards. That said she guided me to do the CV reformatting myself, as with the letters etc, whereas some career counselors/consultants will offer to do this themselves. I'm sure that could be useful for some people, but the experience that I had with a prior consultant was very long-winded and yielded pretty poor results. I think doing it yourself where possible is a bit more real too.