Jobseeking 2

As someone pointed out to me, I haven't said much about getting a job and working in Spain yet. This is partly cause I'd been a bit concerned about talking about employers etc but I'll just speak generally.

What it boils down to is this: if you are a native English speaker, you will be able to survive in Madrid. Even if you´re American, and don't have a work visa, you should be able to get by with particulares, or private classes. There are plenty of websites such as www.tuclasesparticulares.es that you can advertise on and by far most of the responses I've had are people looking for conversational English classes, so no training necessary. Theres also plenty of people looking for native speakers to look after or tutor their kids for cash in hand. However, if you don't have paperwork, expect no more than €10 an hour (which still isn't bad!).

If your a native English speaker with an N.I.E. number, in terms of employability and pay expectations, this beats a degree hands down! The demand for learning English is huge here and there are a load of companies and language schools competing for the various strands of business this produces, all seemingly always looking for teachers. You can expect between €10-€20 an hour for these jobs but some will want you to be autonomo, or self employed, which entails paying your own social security (€178 a month).

If your legal, a native English speaker and are fluent in Spanish... what job would you like? Every company wants more native speakers and you should just be careful not to undersell yourself!

I don't know why the demand for learning English is quite so high but in recent years I think there's been a lot of outsourcing to Spain and mergers with UK companies, and it certainly improves your job prospects as a Spaniard if you have good English.

My personal experience has been starting off at a kind of business English agency that sent me off to be embedded in various other companies to teach their staff, which involved some very good, if intense, training. However, they´ve only been able to give me 12 regular hours a week, which really isn´t enough, so I´ve just started wroking evenings at a language school as well. This is much more relaxed than the business side of teaching, and doesn´t involve any lesson planning which is a big bonus. I´m also working on contract for them which means they pay my social security, which works out very well for me! (Although I imagine I´m going to have a nightmare when it comes to filling in a tax return!).

I´ve really warmed to teaching English, I didn´t think I was going to be that suited to it, but now I really enjoy it and have become a bit of a grammar geek. The students are usually quite fun, especially if you have them week in week out at their work - its like a break for them. Spanish people have a good sense of the ridiculous as well so your often laughing your way through a lesson with them. I find it seriously satisfying when I see them improving as well.

So basically, if your a native English speaker, you´ll have no problem getting a job in Madrid (1st Conditional by the way), and if your an EU citizen with the right to work here, the pay is pretty good too. Not a bad way to ride out the recession I´d say, although I am very aware that the Euro may take a nosedive soon, while my debts undertaken to come out here are in Sterling...

I´m actually having all kinds of headaches with various bank accounts at the moment, due to various reasons, but the main one being that I´m in debt in one country and living in another! The caviat I´d add to what I´ve just said is not to expect to get paid instantly and bear in mind the start up costs like apartment deposits etc. I´m only just getting my first full pay cheque now, having moved here in mid-October but hopefully by mid January things should have levelled out a bit!

Iberian Jobseeking

The hostel owner appears to have gone away for a couple of days, which is probably just as well as he'd have been distraught yesterday – it absolutely tipped it down! Rivers of water running down the streets. Apparently it only rains that hard once a year, and everyone looked very shell-shocked by the whole thing, particularly not being able to sit on the street at cafes. Jorge's disappearance also means that there's another guy on the hostel desk, with a very relaxed attitude to staying up drinking loudly in the kitchen til 5am...

Heavy rain in Sol

Anyway, the main thrust of this post is supposed to be about how I went about getting a job before I set off, for anyone wanting to do the same thing in Spain or probably most of Europe. The thing is, I can't exactly remember how I got it! I put a lot of time into first researching generally getting a job in Spain and then – having the obvious essential thing in most jobs would be speaking Spanish – searching 'English speaking jobs in Spain/Barcelona/Madrid' as well as bombarding every English or Irish bar I could find the email address for, regaling them with tales of my hardwork and enthusiasm for pulling pints and how I was 'ready to jump on a train tomorrow'. The latter turned out to be a bit of a dead end. I only got one reply from what must've been about 30 emails and when they realised I wasn't already in Barcelona, they said sorry but we need someone right away. In hindsight, it wouldn't have been as easy as just turning up – you need a NIE number before you can work in Spain and in big cities that takes about 2 weeks (you need an address in Spain as well so it would be difficult to get before you set off).

Searching for English speaking jobs inevitably involved wading through a lot of guff on Google but there were some good leads in it. Unfortunately this is where my bad memory comes into play - I also searched Gumtree and some other jobs sites and can't remember exactly where or how I found the Vaughan Systems teaching job but it was definitely the best one I'd found and I didn't hestitate to send off my CV (slightly altered from the bar version) and give it a go. I then had to go to London for an interview, feeling a bit stupid in my suit, which was fairly straight forward. It seems they're really just looking for enthusiastic and talkative people with decent English. The drawback, however, is that I haven't definitely got the job yet – the two week training is an ongoing assessment and only an average of 50% make it through, so I am out here on quite a limb as well as having invested a fair bit of cash into getting to London for the interview, buying some 'business casual' attire and time into learning all this grammar, and if I don't get through that'll all largely be in vain.

On my searches I'd also seen a lot of au pair jobs, but they were all looking for women so I stopped looking at them after a while, but just before I left, a friend sent me a link to an agency looking for both men and women (MCS) and they got back to me straight away, offering a family to go and stay with while being an 'English older brother' to their three sons. It sounded quite fun really, and I was sad to turn it down but it only paid 80 Euro's a week living allowance and they lived a little bit out from the centre. Still, I told the agency about my situation and said I'd get back to them if this falls through so at least I have a plan B. I actually met an American girl yesterday working as an au pair and she said it was quite good but at the same time there wasn't much opportunity to meet people or have your own space.

It can be quite a lonely experience, moving to a new city where you don't know anyone and especially where you don't speak the language but I've realised over the past couple of days the only way around this is just to launch yourself into it. Anyone speaking English, holding a dictionary or a guidebook is now your friend, and you can't be shy with what little Spanish you have – you just have to go for it and look like a bit of a fool talking in English if necessary, expressions and gestures can pretty much get most things across. I got chatting to a group of locals in a bar the other night and, although the guy I spent most of the time talking to didn't speak any English, I definitely understood that he was trying to get me to sleep with his sister-in-law!

Anyway, today's the end of my wow-isn't-Madrid-so-cool four day holiday and now its onto the actual everyday of living and working here. I'll let you know how it goes.

Ready? Set? Sort of.

I only decided to move to Spain a couple of weeks ago, in Paris actually, cheesily enough watching the sunset from the steps of Sacre Cour. Why move to London when you can move anywhere? I want to learn Spanish and want to move somewhere different, definately somewhere warmer, but not too far away. So, after a slight detour to Bestival, I sat down and started doing some research into moving to Spain.

I was going to need a job, money being a bit tight, so I thought I'd start there. First problem: I don't speak Spanish. A few searches for 'English speaking jobs in Spain' later and things weren't looking good, unemployment is currently around 40% in Spain and the essential thing most websites advised was being able to speak the language.

Undeterred, I set about finding email addresses for every English and Irish bar in Madrid and Barcelona (I hadn't made up my mind where exactly I was going at this point - wherever they would give me a job was my thinking). Eventually, after countless 'Enthusiastic UK barman seeks job' emails, I came across a couple of teaching jobs that didn't require any Spanish. I've never taught before but worth a try right? To cut a long story short, after an interview in London, I start training for Vaughan Systems in Madrid next Monday (more about this later).

Last minute travel plans ensued. Not wanting to fly (for environmental and luggage reasons), I tried to book a train which sounded amazing, like a hotel on rails: beds, a dining car, a bar, watching the sunrise over breakfast and all that. My advice: book it early! Last minute is near impossible, especially if your on a budget, so instead I'm getting on a Eurolines bus at 8am tomorrow morning for a gruelling 28 hour coach journey with no beds, no dining car, no bar, no sunrise and no breakfast.

Hostel booked for a couple of weeks during the training, I'm hoping to meet some people and find a flat before long. I've been thinking a good way to learn Spanish would be to move in with some non-English speaking Spaniards but on the other hand that might be a little too deep end. Anyway, I've got a couple of days to get orientated in this city I've never been to, before I start the (apparently very intense) training.

I have clothes, a passport, a laptop, a trumpet, and 2 pairs of boxers (I forgot the rest), wish me luck!