WayneM

This sounds like me when I visit my wife's family in India. When I go in the summer, we're all dressed the same way, though people tell me I look like I am struggling in the heat. I went once in January, escaping the snow and ice, to find nice 20 degree days. There I am, sunbathing in the garden wearing only shorts, next to where construction workers are building a house, wearing jumpers on their cold January day as they hammer in heavy bits of metal on the roof.

Thanks for all the feedback everybody. As per your initial comment Marisa, we've already sunk quite a bit of time looking around on homely/realestate.com. You are right, after wisely buying my house 6 months before the big crash in 2007, we're only just back in the position now where we have any equity to speak of and it's not much. Based on this, we dismissed Sydney and Melbourne quite quickly. Sydney would be good from the perspective that my wife has quite a few university friends and distant family there, but as much as we love camping, we would really like to be able to buy a house! Melbourne looks cheaper and is less daunting from a climate-change-shock perspective, but still worryingly expensive (though probably a great investment). I've seen a few posts here of people in IT struggling to find work in Melbourne. In the UK, I see a lot of people from my wife's hometown moving to London and I wonder why they do it. House prices are crazy compared to elsewhere, and the salaries don't seem to make up for the mortgage problem. I put it down to a lack of research and I guess people see London and England as the same place, and wonder if I am viewing Australian capital cities in the same way. We looked at Adelaide which appeared to have cheaper housing and sounded like a nice place, but reading about the 'brain drain' put me off as did some analysis on seek, which is where we started looking at Queensland. Whether it would be too much of a climate shock is difficult to say - I am cogniscent of the fact that it would take time to acclimatise and the only way of knowing how you feel after acclimitisation is after you've gone through it! As per this thread, mixed reports on the climate though for most it seems to be great until the height of summer, terribly humid in the summer.

My EOI invite has come through for my 189, and it feels like time to start getting more serious on planning my family's big move. I've read a lot on this forum, posted a little, and it also feels like posting an introduction as a hello would be a start in getting more involved here. I have so many big and small questions whirling round my over-analytical mind. So, I work in software engineering and am very experienced. My wife is Indian and has lived in the UK for a decade so is one step ahead of me in experiencing international migration. Her occupation is less well defined, as she hasn't had a serious managerial position in 10 years as she slotted building the family in alongside getting a few more masters degrees, but her background is in healthcare management. We have two young kids, one just turned 6, the other almost 4. The biggest, most complicated thing to try to zone in on is where to land and start our new life. I want to get that right rather than whizz kids around different schools and lose money in moving around, the factors we're trying to weigh up from the UK in choosing a destination revolve around house prices, career opportunities and climate which are all probably common scenarios. Having lived in a small Lancashire town for a long time, we've learnt to try to be somewhere with more work in my field, and that we would benefit from being in an area with a larger south-east asian community than here. So far, we are zoning in on Queensland and Brisbane as the most likely spot. I'd be interested to hear how people have gone about comparing employability in different cities, in the absence of any better data, I've been looking at job boards, counting the number of opportunities advertised that match my skills, then dividing by some population figure to work out number of jobs available to me versus the presumed competition!

So how are things getting on with creating PommieTechie.au?

@Brucolino I emphasise with your position and truly hope you find suitable employment soon. My empathy is based on a fear of being in the same boat this time next year! You mentioned working for a huge multinational for a number of years, but it sounds like you have only worked for one organisation? If you are applying for jobs in smaller organisations that might cut their cloth accordingly, do you think you may be coming across as overqualified or used to a certain set of perhaps rigid processes? This thread has been a bit of an eye opener for me, the Australian recruitment market sound rather different to how it works in the UK, and I had figured that the difficulty in filling posts within the software development field was a globally applicable problem. I have loads of experience recruiting in the UK, primarily looking for Software Developers where getting the right mix of soft and hard skills is really not easy, but I've also recruited for Testers and Analysts similar to Brucolino. How typical I am as a recruiter I don't know, but if you're as good as Brucolino appears to be getting a job with a generic CV in the UK really isn't that hard. Interviews might be tougher, but if your ability and experience is good, which countries or industry sectors you have worked in are next to irrelevant due to issues with supply & demand for talent. I let successful applicants know verbally within an hour after the interview, and they have written offers within a day or two. In UK IT, I've only seen the necessity of carefully crafted cover lettings covering points against job descriptions within the public sector which is altogether more slow. I'm surprised to see how different it is in Melbourne; hopefully it all sorts itself out soon. Fingers crossed getting involved in the networking scene will make a difference, it certainly can't hurt.

Sorry, no idea how that post happened! I was reading the thread with interest, put my smartphone in my pocket, and must have pushed some buttons whilst in there. I struggle with technology!!!

Airbnb was completely new to me until a couple of months ago, since then I've used it a few times when staying in cities in the UK that are a bit far from home, I found it pretty good, they collected ID off me and all sorts and my hosts have always been great. I am thinking (assuming the visa process works out positively) to go ahead of my family in a similar way to what your husband is doing and will most likely use airbnb for it. If you stick to the site's policies and use airbnb hosts with good reviews, I wouldn't be worried about scams personally, and I am sure they're more economical than a standard hotel.