You boykies interview in gimpsuits??? My "Efrickaan" mates have never mentioned this before, I'll never look at them the same way again! To give you an idea of how easy it should be to get work here, the role I'm in was originally offerred (and accepted) by a Nigerian chap who interviewed over the phone. It's never been entirely clear whether it was the same guy who actually turned up to do the job, but after 2 days it became apparent that he couldn't even tell the difference between an inner and an outer join, bit of a problem for a developer dba. That was a contracting role, I've since gone permanent. What still pickles me to this day is, the guy that did the tech interview is pretty clever & in many respects skillswise superior to me. In all honesty, you'll probably find when/if you get here that for many workplaces the bar is so low you may have to limbo dance under it (I have actually been declined an IT role because I was overqualified).
Landy - it's spelled "Boytjies" - hehehe and it's our tradition, okay? Thanks for the heads up... i'll deffinately keep that in mind.
I know.....one of those mates imports & sells potjies....was just being daft Us gaels are pretty good at words sounding nothing like they're spelt. Wemyss Bay (pronounced "weems"), Dumyat (pronounced dumb-eye-at). I'm just waiting for someone to tell me auchtermuchty is pronounced "tw@t"
Cost of living in the Netherlands is as high as in Germany or Switzerland (I know --I grew up there. But we won't go into that...). Most Dutch speak a pretty decent English, and some German (although they won't admit to that. Still not quite got past that whole German occupation WWII thing). Dutch is relatively easy to make sense of if you understand Afrikaans, but that does not make you proficient at Dutch. Its grammar and syntax is as confoundedly complicated as that of German.
Not quite as complicated - Dutch doesn't have cases, thank god! That's the thing that always trips me up in German, at least. The two languages are very close though, I've seen many native German speakers learn decent Dutch very quickly. Friend got back to me with some jobsites that work well in the Netherlands: www.intermedair.nl www.monsterboard.nl www.jobrapido.nl and for government jobs: www.werkenbijdeoverheid.nl They're in Dutch, of course. That way, you can test how much you can figure out! heh. Let me know if you need any help translating or finding things. Aachen is pretty close to Maastricht - a nice city, as far as I've seen. Then there's the more technology-oriented cities Eindhoven and Nijmegen at about 1-1.5 hour train ride from there. Most jobs will be in the 'Randstad', the cluster of cities in the west of the country: Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam and Utrecht.
Thanks, Scorpsel. Looking into those sites now, will scream if it makes no sense. @nexxo: I meant to imply that i could get into understanding dutch, rather than speaking it. I have heard enough dutch to know that speaking it would require a bit more than the background in Afrikaans and German I have. But a basic understanding of it should come rather quickly. Reading it, for example, while not flawless, I can get a rather good understanding of what's being said.
hey bru! I'm dutch, live in Germany at the moment and worked in South Africa last year. if you speak afrikaans, and your somehow good with languages, dutch won't be a problem. anyway, in your market everyone will speak english, so thats not really anything to worry about. living costs are pretty much all the same in western europe, i'd estimate UK and switserland to be the most expensive. someone else noticed it a bit earlier, you'll need contacts here somehow. just to start from scratch in another country isn't easy (i've been through it twice ) with contacts it'll be flippin hard. good luck
