Posts Tagged ‘job’

For at least the first six months winning a Greencard is like living in a dream cloud! You just can’t stop to dream about how your new life abroad is going to be, how nice you will live (at the beach in our case) and how good the jobs you get may be. But someday you wake up from that dream and hit reality!

I have tried to convince myself that it will be a long and hard road from the beginning. But you just seem to catch yourself hanging by dream clouds. Flo and I are grown up enough to know that we have hard paths in front of us, so right now (six months before our actual moving date) we are doing a lot of research on emmigration and about the US in general.

What scares us the most ist he money part! Not the actual money, because we do have enough to move, but the money and credit card situation in general. As you already may have heard as an american you pay by credit card the most! You pay your rent by credit card you pay your car by credit card and you pay your food by credit card. The only problem about that is: You don’t get a credit card in the US, when you don’t have a credit history! And I guess you can figure out by yourself what that means!

To make it short: Your credit history is a certificate that proves your credit reliability. It is a record (made by Equifax, Transunion and Experian) that states your past usage of your credit card and how fast and constant you paid back your credits. The higher your score (between 300-850), the better is your credit reliability (the so called FICO score).

First thing that may come to your mind is: I do have a credit card in my homeland, so why can’t they just write me a credit history for the US? Well, they just can’t! The only credit card company that does that is American Express. And, oh wonder: No, we don’t use American Express!

Right now we are trying to figure out ways to help us with the credit history problem! I will keep you updated with it! But anyways: If you have some advice, you are more than welcome!

We want to move to the US at the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011 and right now I have the urge to start sending applications. For the last year I constantly have been looking for jobs that would be good to apply to and tried to check out the regularity of new matching jobs for me to open up. When I saw two good job ads last week I finally thought: Now is the time to start! And I started my job hunt in America.

I actually made a tiny step towards it in January. The job I found back then was kind of a perfect match for me and I would have taken the chance to move for it any minute. But the big problem was: German applications are not in any way similar to the ones required on the online application forms in the US. Even with the help of our american friend Scott, I wasn’t able to fill out the application form correctly and didn’t get to send it. Perhaps back then it was fate that holded me back from applying, because about a week later I got my current job, which I am very thankful for. But now I really mean it. I want the jobs I applied for.

But let’s go a step back first and let me tell you about the fun time we had while filling out the application forms yesterday. I already was used to only being allowed to apply via the online form. In Germany you normally do apply per E-Mail or send in an letter application – at least to the companies I applied to in the last years. I already had an english version of my resume so I was able to upload it without any problems. But what gave me little problems where the contact informations on my supervisors that I needed to give. I immediatley thought about my editor-in-chief, which would be anything but amused to get an english speaking call from an american employer. Again the giggles were on my side when I had to answer the following questions: Would you do a drug test on request? Are you hispanic or latino? Are you a war veteran? Do you want to give information on your gender? To a german person these questions sound so strange. In Germany you have to send in a picture with an application, which kind of leaves no question on the gender topic. And have I ever been asked, if I were a war veteran in my life? No!

The end of the story is that i completed my applications and now hope to hear from these companies, for those jobs are great! I kind of worry to talk to a potential employer on the phone and I guess this fear will stay for at least another year. But the good thing is: I may not have to worry about bad application pictures anymore and will not waste expensive stamps and application dossiers in the future. But if this will get me a job? Cross your fingers for me!