Read Part I — Moving Abroad!

So what do you need to do first when you arrive in a new country?

  • register at the town hall,
  • get a mobile telephone number,
  • open a bank account,
  • register at a health insurance company, and
  • find a job.

As a Hungarian tourist, I could stay a maximum of 90 days in Belgium. After the registration at the town hall I could obtain another 90 days to find a job, with the government somehow monitoring this process. If I do not find a job in 90 days, I have to leave the country. Basically this brings me to a few options:

  1. Register the day I arrive and have only 90 days in the country.
  2. Register just before I run out of the 90 tourist days, then I will have 90 + 90 days in the country.

But how does this work when you leave the country for a longer period during your tourist days? I’m not talking about going to the other side of the Dutch border for a few hours. I’m thinking in days. I couldn’t find information about that, so my boyfriend and I agreed that if I go abroad for a longer period (like a few days, a week or more), then I am not a tourist in Belgium. Why? Because I am not in the country. If I can prove that, then after an ‘absence’, I come back to Belgium and my 90 tourist days starts all over. This brought us to the ideal plan: if I can’t find a job in 90 days, I will just go back to Hungary for a week or two, and then come back and continue looking for a job.

And this brings us to another problem. I am not registered and I do not have an address in Belgium. So I cannot open a bank account. As far as I know in most (European) countries it is required to have a local address and it is prohibited to have an address in the USA. So what can I do without a bank account?

  • Health insurance requires a bank account.
  • Mobile telephone numbers require a bank account, if I want a subscription.

So I decided to live a ‘wild life’, and have no health insurance for a few days, weeks or months. But I still needed a mobile telephone number, as most companies would not call me on foreign mobile telephone numbers.

A prepaid phone card could have been a possibility, but my parents always told me, that in case of an emergency, it is better to have a mobile subscription, because you cannot run out of money and you can always make a call. Of course, we do not consider the situation, that you may pay your bills and the mobile company blocks your number. So I tried to stick to this rule, and I asked my boyfriend to put the automatic payment on his bank account, and I would pay him back in cash.

Because of some promising web promotions, I registered on the online, but the SIM card never arrived. After waiting for a week, I decided to go to the mobile company and inquire about my registration. Well, unfortunately, their online registration form just didn’t work, so I had to register in the shop and pay full price. As a compensation, they allowed me to choose my new mobile number and it ended up being quite an easy number. This was not the best financial option, but it was still better than nothing.

Okay, this problem is solved! Finally I live in Belgium, I have a Belgian phone number and an English CV, so let’s apply for jobs! Most job advertisements looked the same:

  • looking for someone aged 22–26
  • with 30 years of experience in almost everything
  • and sometimes also add a degree (bachelor and/or master)

Well, this is already looking pretty awful. But where can I search for jobs? It depends on what kind of jobs one is looking for. Sometimes you can just walk around town and see which shops and restaurants are looking for someone. For me, with a Software Engineer BSc degree, that option is not feasible. I can either search online or in newspapers. I have decided to try only online, because it is simpler. LinkedIn was my site of option. Easy! I just filled out the data with the contents of my CV and while I am looking at jobs, HR people can also find me. Obviously, I mentioned in my headline that I’m looking for a job in the Leuven area, and also set my location to Leuven.

LinkedIn has a nice way to look for jobs and it is easy to filter them. But I noticed a big problem. Many of these advertisements were in either Dutch or French. Well, I don’t really speak any of these languages, so that is a significant obstacle. Sometimes I also found advertisements in English with a comment stating “only French speaking need to apply” which has happened about 90% of the time. I knew I would have a disadvantage because of language, but I did not think it would be this overwhelming.

For the IT knowledge part, I still had a good chance. I tried to look for junior positions and sometimes mid-level or non-senior positions. I already had more than a year experience and I could easily learn new technologies.

Besides LinkedIn I decided to look for companies I heard about. Leuven is a small town and most of the international companies are located in Brussels. The problem with Brussels is that there I literally have no chance without a solid knowledge of French. I applied for companies where I could offer way more than what they wanted but they didn’t want me because of my lack of French knowledge.

So, I decided to send my CV to as many places as possible, in hope that a company would call me even if I don’t speak the required languages.

After a month of searching and sending about 30 emails, I got two rejections on LinkedIn and one phone call. A Belgian company called me asking me to reapply after I learn Dutch on a business level. Well thanks, that is indeed helpful. I felt really disappointed. I did not expect the job search in the IT world, with a degree and a sound knowledge of English, to be this difficult.

In May, I had to return to Budapest to visit my family. During that week one company finally reached out to me and invited me for an interview! At last something! Of course I knew this was not final, so I didn’t stop looking for new opportunities.

After returning to Leuven, I went to my first Belgian interview. According to the job advertisement, they wanted some Java knowledge and a lot of JavaScript experience. During the interview they required deep Java knowledge, which I did not have, as in the past years I did not work in Java. I felt like being at an exam where I don’t know the answers. My feeling was that this was not going well as I didn’t expect this to be as hard. One of the worst things you can experience is to land in an interview where they act as if somebody else wrote the job ad. The requirements were way out of scope.

I had to wait about two weeks for their answer, which as expected was not a job offer.

Read Part III — Landing a Job @ Dacota One: Direct Route from Budapest to Leuven!