Job Acquired, Visa Application Underway!

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve been able/willing to post an update. While we were purely in the consideration stages, it was something that we could discuss abstractly (Why Sweden?). Once we seriously started looking to relocate, in my case via job hunting, we weren’t ready to talk to family about it – so no posting for a bit. All the family has been told, so I’m back!

Swedish job offer acquired!

The bright side to my work with Microsoft Dynamics NAV is that it’s a world-wide skillset, and heavily in use in the EU. It’s also a rare skillset, especially with over a decade of experience of development, consulting, and training. This gave me some unique skills to quest for work abroad.

Knowing all that, I put applications in to a few different Dynamics NAV shops in Gothenburg that looked like good possible opportunities back in fall of 2013. One shop was nice enough to ping me back right away, and while they couldn’t offer me a position, they were super nice about offering advice about what aspects of my experience would make me attractive to other companies in the area. Otherwise, it was total radio silence.

Something I did not know, but do now, is that spring is the season of job hunting and hiring. There’s a fun reason for that: in short, most people give 3 months’ notice and want to be done in July to start new jobs in August after most summer vacations.

Well, early April, I was contacted by Stefan from Update Affärssystems (“Update Business Systems”). We had a short series of phone interviews, and he offered to fly me over to meet the team and negotiate my contract. There were many things about that process that I found interesting and strange, enough to warrant a post of its own (Soon^TM). But, the short of it, I’m hired to start in August, so we’ll be all sorts of busy figuring out how to dismantle the life here and build a new one there – while we wait for news from Migrationsverket about the Work Permit.

This means I’ll be doing a lot more chattering on here about all the things I’ve learned so far, just from conversations and a couple of visits, to explain to either side of the cultural divide we’re crossing. I hope you’ll enjoy coming along on our journey.