Moving to UK from New Zealand to contract

[Pgtips]

I'm moving to the UK later on in the year - August/September. I am a British Citizen so have full working rights.

I'm interested in hearing from anyone who has moved from abroad to contract and what their experiences were like. Also, interested to get some feedback on the daily rate I should expect to get.

I've been in IT for 17 years and have years of experience with design and implementation of:

Citrix XenApp 4 - 7.6
Citrix NetScaler 10
Windows 2000-2012 server
Active Directory
VMware ESX 3 -6
Exchange 5.5 - 2013
Lync 2010-2013
Enterprise Vault 10 - 11
Office 365
Netbackup & Backup Exec

I've checked JobServe but there is such a variance in rate I've seen ads for relevant skills go from 250 - 550

Thanks 😀

[nomadd]

I'm interested in hearing from anyone who has moved from abroad to contract and what their experiences were like.

About 90% of the work is in London.
About 90% of your post-tax income will go in rent.

NZ is a much nicer place.

[WTFH]

NZ is a much nicer place.

Yes, the sheep are better looking.

But there's a lot of similarities - NZ's best rugby players are South Sea Islanders too.

[uk contractor]

Sorry to have to tell you but the IT goldrush ended in UK about 5 years ago. Your skillset will fetch perhaps £250-300 a day max if you can even find a role nowadays a lot of these roles are being outsourced to the lowest bidder which means the contractor gets very little.
Your competing against highly skilled people who have worked in the UK for years & have a checkable history.

Lots of employers now want security checks for these type of higher level roles can you pass the CRB check & or other security clearances required like police checks, education checks, credit checks, referee checks etc etc. The days of just starting a role without extensive checks are rapidly fading. You should come here & try to get a 3 month contract first see how easy/hard that is. Or another option is look at the websites for NZ/Australian companies based in London they advertise jobs directly it will be easier to get into one of those as a lot of the people in HR are from NZ or Australia in my experience having worked at a couple over the years.

Good luck but its harder than ever to find an IT job in London too much competition & your probably going to be heavily disadvantaged by not having a fully checkable UK based credit, police & background check history for the roles which require that.

[meridian]

I can't comment on expected rates, etc, but for security checks it's not quite as difficult as that.

I spent a few years in Australia and them returned to the UK, first contract back required a site security check to get into the IT offices of a defence firm. The vetting was handled by a third party that requested all the usual bank statements, pay slips, etc, and they sent off a request for details to the Australian Federal Police to check.

It took about two months from end to end, but went through okay eventually. If you're prepared to wait (and so is the client!) then it's not an impossible situation.

[Pgtips]

Sorry to have to tell you but the IT goldrush ended in UK about 5 years ago. Your skillset will fetch perhaps £250-300 a day max if you can even find a role nowadays a lot of these roles are being outsourced to the lowest bidder which means the contractor gets very little.
Your competing against highly skilled people who have worked in the UK for years & have a checkable history.

Lots of employers now want security checks for these type of higher level roles can you pass the CRB check & or other security clearances required like police checks, education checks, credit checks, referee checks etc etc. The days of just starting a role without extensive checks are rapidly fading. You should come here & try to get a 3 month contract first see how easy/hard that is. Or another option is look at the websites for NZ/Australian companies based in London they advertise jobs directly it will be easier to get into one of those as a lot of the people in HR are from NZ or Australia in my experience having worked at a couple over the years.

Good luck but its harder than ever to find an IT job in London too much competition & your probably going to be heavily disadvantaged by not having a fully checkable UK based credit, police & background check history for the roles which require that.

Thanks for the info. I've noticed that quite a few of these roles require security clearance and those ones command premium rates. I wonder if permie roles are more lucrative.

[clearedforlanding]

Operations has been outsourced to such an extent (if it is not already something-aaS) that is not viable to contract in operations in many, many places - least of all London.

Unless you fancy working for an Indian guy who rages at you all day long and bunking up with your work colleagues, living off dried noodles, I would advise remaining in paradise.

[Pgtips]

Operations has been outsourced to such an extent (if it is not already something-aaS) that is not viable to contract in operations in many, many places - least of all London.

Unless you fancy working for an Indian guy who rages at you all day long and bunking up with your work colleagues, living off dried noodles, I would advise remaining in paradise.

I'm not looking to work in operations, I would like contracts such as Citrix Upgrades/Migrations, Exchange - Office 365, deploy Skype for business etc. That's the work I've been doing in my post as a consultant in NZ for a number of years. (And in Australia too.)

Surely it's not as doom and gloom as everyone is making out...

[clearedforlanding]

I'm not looking to work in operations, I would like contracts such as Citrix Upgrades/Migrations, Exchange - Office 365, deploy Skype for business etc. That's the work I've been doing in my post as a consultant in NZ for a number of years. (And in Australia too.)

Surely it's not as doom and gloom as everyone is making out...

Which is all lumped under operations. It's BAU stuff these days and the likes of Tata, Wipro et all have the market that clientcos don't have covered themselves.

The market is saturated with people with your skillset.

In the UK it is doom and gloom unless you have tenure & niche skills in IB or telecoms. There might be something else, but nothing comes to mind.

[Pgtips]

Which is all lumped under operations. It's BAU stuff these days and the likes of Tata, Wipro et all have the market that clientcos don't have covered themselves.

The market is saturated with people with your skillset.

In the UK it is doom and gloom unless you have tenure & niche skills in IB or telecoms. There might be something else, but nothing comes to mind.

But I'd imagine that a lot of this saturation would be people with a lot less experience say 3-5 years and people with paper certifications and no experience.
Even over here there is a lot of saturation and 100's of CV's are sent in for the same type of position. I've always managed to stand out in these situations.