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Susy shared her experiences recently to help expats looking for jobs in Germany. See what she had to say in the following video.

Video transcription

Hey I’m Susy. I am a New Zealand expat living in Berlin and I’ve been here for three years now. I work in PR and customer marketing.

What brought me to Germany

New Zealand is a wonderful place but it is pretty small, so in terms of the job market it’s more limited in terms of opportunities and companies that you can work for. One of the reasons was to live in Europe and try something different – Berlin seemed like a good place to come because it does have an English speaking community here so I knew it might be a little easier to find work.

Another reason Berlin was attractive is because of the culture here and the creative space that it is, so I really wanted to be close to that as well.

My experience searching for a job in Germany

When I came to Berlin I came on a working holiday visa. Some countries have a one year working holiday visa, sort of a collaboration with Germany, so I was able to get a one year visa pretty easily, and with this I was able to do any work, and I found work with a startup when I arrived in the travel industry. And I found that job on a job-seeking website for startups. I was curious to work in a startup because I had been working in pretty traditional organizations before that so it was cool to try something a bit new and younger.

My #1 tip for expat jobseekers in Germany

One key tip is just meeting people and making sure you network as much as possible. It could be with people you know or just going to meetups. For me for my current job I found it through a friend who was changing positions in a company and her position came up and I applied for it. So it was just a case of talking to people and letting them know I was looking. I think you just have to be really open and let people know that you are looking for things as much as possible.

I think when you can actually talk to someone about jobs it really is a nice kind of way to personalize it. Of course you can go online and look that way and look for English speaking jobs, or if you are lucky to be bilingual or have more than one language you can seek for those as well.

I think one thing about Berlin that is really great is that it’s so open-minded – people are very open-minded. And for me I found that when I came to Berlin I actually went back to some old hobbies as a way to meet people and actually kind of indulge in some things that I hadn’t done in a long time. I’ve done a lot of music here which is really great. I think the nice thing about Berlin is that you can just explore other things that you enjoy and that can lead you into some really other interesting work as well – That’s quite a cool thing.

Another good way to look at jobs as well is look at companies you really like and be open to trying something different because you might have some skills you didn’t know that you had or you haven’t tried exploring in a work place before, but you might really enjoy them and it’s a great place to try.

You can check out sites like expatjobseeker.de which has a great listing of jobs available for expats like yourself.

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