Zoe Gell
Hello again from sunny Brisbane. It’s been all go here – dust storms for starters!! It was like the Sahara here for a while….
I have to say I am actually missing the cooler London weather, the heat here is starting to really drive me crazy and my husband has been consulting numerous air conditioning companies to sort some out for our house – but as of yet can’t decide which to go for, so in the mean time I am frying like a proper English breakfast!
So last time I was telling you how I had packed up, left my lovely marcomms job and moved my life down under to Brisbane. I thought it would be so easy to breeze into a new marketing job but as I soon discovered I couldn’t have arrived at a worse time.
The recruitment consultancy I registered with at the time said had I arrived six months earlier I would have been fighting off employers with a stick! But I had arrived in the middle of what was described as the worst economic crisis in a very long time!! I did manage to get work but it wasn’t that easy. I was so used to the plethora of marketing recruiters in London that I suddenly found that it is a lot smaller and personal here in Brisbane, with the general rule being that you stick to one recruitment agency and not register with several like everyone does in London.
What doesn’t kill you…
It got quite depressing at one point as I was applying for job after job and not even getting a ‘no’ letter let alone an interview. I started to think something was wrong with me and that maybe I had imagined all the things I had done and the skills that I had. I changed my attitude and decided I needed to see what was out there and to do some more investigating into how people get jobs in Brisbane.
I did get a job and am enjoying the contracting scene, seeing what is out there. I have started to do some volunteer work for charities when not working on a contract which I have found rewarding and also a good way to network and find out about jobs that aren’t advertised.
Building a network
It seems to be a lot about networking here in Brisbane at the moment. Who you know counts for a lot. There are a lot of networking groups in Brisbane which I have duly noted and promised myself I will attend at some point such as Babes in Business, Network Marketing and Brisbane Women – (sorry for the guys out there!) there are other non single gender networking groups too such as the Meet-up groups… and I have heard from a lot of colleagues that they find networking the best way to get new contracts and to move up in business.
Bye for now