UNEMPLOYMENT SPAIN SEPT 2014 - men 23,5%, women 25.6%, under 25’s 53.8%...
Where to start… do you have any formal EU recognised qualifications in your chosen trade or profession?
If that chosen trade or profession is in any way related to the building industry, right away I would say forget it…
As a Brit the only way you are going to find work especially if you want to work with other Brits, is to provide a service to the expat communities already established here.
Having been out here for seven years, I can say quite categorically that a good 50% of Brit’tradesmen’ are cowboys; their charges for ‘services rendered’ are normally far in excess of those asked by the Spanish.
Unless you choose to live in a Brit community and limit yourself to providing a service solely to that community you need to be able to speak Spanish fluently, conversatioanal Spanish is not enough as you will find the first time you have to deal with officialdom.
Universities here, as in the UK, are churning out degree qualified people who have absolutely no chance of finding work; many leave Spain completely seeking work in other EU counties and being forced to accept jobs in traditionally low paid industries like tourism, catering and hospitatlity.
Most UK trade qualifications are not directly acceptable or transferable to Spain.
To be honest the only expats that are likely to make the transition to living in Spain are those with independent means, ie pensioners and retirees who do not have to rely on employment to get by and even those are subject to the sometimes wild variations in the GBP/Euro exchange rate. The actual purchasing power of these has suffered enormously since 2008… When we arrived in 2006 1000GBP would get you 1600Euros; in the big slump in 2011 the exchange rate dropped to parity, that same 1000GBP now was worth only 1000Euros; couple that with ever increasing inflation and effectively we saw a 33% drop in the purchasing value of our income. Even now the rate is hovering around 1:1.27: we can never hope for a return to the glory days of 2006 to 2010. Thousands upon tousands of Brit families have found it necessary to return to the UK; the property slump has left them with houses that are worth only a fraction of their original purchase price.
Estate agents will tell you that property prices are recovering slowly but they would say that wouldnt they… the higher the price they can get for a property the more thay can charge in commission. About 30% of the houses in my little village are either for sale or empty and quite literally falling down from lack of repair having stood empty for five years or more.
Yes this is all negative stuff and I’m not being deliberately pessimistic… I just believe in telling it like it is…
I would suggest this… take a leave of absence from your chosen trade or profession and come out here for three months. Take off the rose tinted glasses of a tourist and see for yourself. Get in among the locals, expats and Spanish and talk to them. If after three months you can see an opening then by all means ‘go for it.’ But dont burn your bridges; always ensure that you have sufficient funding to go back ‘home’ if things dont work out. Its all too slip into an ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ situation.
You will get no support from Spanish Social Services, no unemployment benefit, you will have to subscribe to the Spanish version of the NHS and, self employed, this could cost you 250 Euros per month whether you are working or not. You should seriously consider Private Health Insurance because your UK issued EHIC card will have no validity; its there for holiday emergency cover only.
A bleak picture… YES! but thats just the way it is…
I dont expect that you will get much in the way of positive responses on this forum the forum has lost a lot of people who used to contribute on a regular basis, but we were hit by a savage spamming attack about a year ago and many people just walked away and never came back. There is a wealth of information available via the home page of this website which I suggest you take a look at… you might also direct your query to other expat forums but most will say the same thing…
fb Mod / Admin.
fb
