The next hurdle: finding a job–and success

Moving to Australia was not that hard as I had all the qualifications, but settling down would be much harder. At least, that is what I originally thought. First of all, I needed a job. Without a job, I cannot have my own place (well, I cannot afford to have my own place), buy a car (without a car, you are going to waste a lot of time) and do anything for that matter. Finding the first job in Australia is the hard part, because there is a risk for the company when hiring someone who is new to the environment. After that, "people say" that it gets easier.

So, in the first few days, I had one goal: find a job as soon as possible.

Soon after leaving Japan, I made a connection with someone in Japan who offered to hook me up with recruiters here. Unfortunately, it did not yield me with any job opportunities but I received some good advice. And then, I did what everyone would do. I prepared a decent resume (which I had started couple of months ago and was continually evolving), updated my LinkedIn profile and applied to jobs on popular job boards like Seek and Indeed. I mainly applied for C/C++ related jobs, but it was underwhelming because most of the opportunities were for Java, C# and web development jobs. I wanted to go in the direction of C# development, but nobody would want to give me a shot without any commercial experience with C#.

But then I got lucky.

One of my former colleagues who had moved to Australia a while back, was resigning from an embedded hardware/software company thus a vacancy opened up. I went for the interviews there, and I received a job offering; probably my friend's influence helped a lot. It is a known fact that internal references get a high priority when filling positions. My experience developing the printer drivers, which was not exactly embedded, but close enough, must have helped too. It was a decent pay for a first position and there was the opportunity to try out new things, so I accepted the job. But it is a bit far away from  my cousin's place. It takes about 1.5-2hrs to get to work from there using public transport. But it would only be for a short time as I am looking to move into an apartment/house near my office, so that would cut down on the commuting times significantly.

I had several phone interviews from several other companies too, some of which I did when I was in Sri Lanka. The ones I did when I was in Sri Lanka did not advance any further, probably due to my lack of immediate availability. I got one HR phone interview after arriving in Australia from a company that had a fabulous working environment, and they invited me to a test and a formal interview, but I had already taken that other job, and I did not want to waste someone else's interview slot, so I rejected. I got an invitation to a phone interview from another company as well, but it was too late (and they took a whole month to sort it out), so I rejected that as well.

So, now I have a job in Australia. It only took me like 2 weeks to secure a job, so I am very pleased. There are people who go on without jobs for months and months. So I should consider myself pretty lucky. But to be honest, the luck only helped me get the interview. It is my experience/capabilities that got me the job.

Objective one complete; to finding an apartment then.

Moved to Australia with a Permanent Resident Visa

I did not mention on my blog as to what was going to happen after I moved back to Sri Lanka from Japan. Now you know. I decided to move to Australia.

Why? I have my own reasons, which I do not wish to talk in this post. I will address that topic on a later day. More than anything else, I need to convince myself that I made the right decision.

This post is about the whole story of applying and getting the PR. It is quite a bit of a long read though.

The start

We, obviously, applied for the Australian Permanent Residency while we were in Japan. We applied through Skilled Migration. The whole process started in April 2014, not too long after my kid was born.

I was first going to go through an agent, because I did not want to mess it up. My friend Saman referred me to the agent he used. I talked with him, but there were some issues that I was afraid of which might pop up half way through. The main problem with using an agent is that as he does everything on behalf of us, we have to send him money to his account using some way. We cannot pay him via a credit card, and Japanese banks aren't that easy to deal with. Heck, sending money back to Sri Lanka is a pain, and there are large bank charges to deal with. I could send money to my dad using my NRFC account, and then give him LKR, but it is too much work. But that was probably the way to do it.

But that's when I contacted one of my senior colleagues who had also moved to Australia. She told me that there was no reason to use an agent; everything can be done online, and she had documented the whole process; which was almost identical to mine. Almost, because she did not have to take her family as she was single. However, this not only could saved me some time & money, but I could actually use my credit card to pay for everything. So I decided to drop the agent. He was not too happy about it, as he had to devote some of his precious time to discuss matters with me, and I was not paying him for his time. Well, it was unfortunate and I wish it did not have to happen that way. If he could have suggested me a reasonable way to send the money, I would have still gone with the agent. I hope I did not cause too much of a loss to him anyway.

Skill Evaluation

The first thing I did next was to apply for Skill evaluation. As I had work experience in the field of Software Engineering, I decided to apply as a Software Engineer. To get the skills evaluated, I had to apply to the Australian Computer Society or ACS. They didn't reduce any points for my education as I have an IT degree as well. Even then, the Engineering degree from the University of Moratuwa probably would have qualified fully, as it had many modules in the ICT field. It took about 3 months to receive their evaluation results. This cost me about JPY 50,000. Sadly, they only approved me as skilled for 4 years. You get 5 points for 3 years, 10 points for 5 years and 15 points for 8 years. So I got only 5 points for my skills.

What happened to Logitech Z623 speakers

Remember that I had the Logitech Z623 speaker set when I was in Japan. Do you want to know what happened to them? Its fate was decided the same way I decided the fate of a lot of hardware, whenever I wanted to upgrade: Auction!

Bringing them along with me to Sri Lanka was not feasible for the following reasons.

• It was huge and heavy. There was no way I could have brought it back with me without using sea cargo. We decided not to use sea cargo, because it was cheaper to replace everything with new items than to ship used parts, especially considering the complexities that would arise early this year, which you will learn in the near future I suppose.
• The speakers only supported 100V power from the mains. I could have used a step down transformer, but it is not an elegant solution. It adds more cost.
• It has that issue with the power button. The culprit appears to be the inconsistent contact between the leads in the power switch. Sadly, access to the power switch is difficult, but I am sure I would be able to fix it with the help of my dad. Still, there was a little doubt that it would completely resolve the issue.
• This was I get to try out something new in the coming months. I hate rotting with the same gear for too long. This was that opportunity to upgrade.

I had it listed up on

Rakuten Auction for a while, but nobody wanted to buy it.Perhaps, Japanese people are more interested in smaller, Japanese made speakers. So I had to drop the price all the way down to JPY 2,500 but I made the buyer pay for shipping. Finally someone placed a bit. I had made up my mind to give it away to a friend, if nobody wanted to bid for it. Luckily, I didn't have to go there.

The sad thing is though, the speakers are very good and strong. And it would cost a fortune to own those speakers in Sri Lanka. In fact, the prices of it in Japan has also gone up by 50% or so since I bought it. It could be due to the drop of value of Japanese currency, but it is quite an old product. I had it for 3 years too.