How difficult is it to find a job when speaking very little Spanish??
Posted: 04 January 2008 04:56 AM  
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Hi guys. We (me and my boyfriend) are Polish and currently living in Australia, but want to move closer to home, so we decided we will go to Spain
We plan to move over there in the second half of 2009. The question is - how difficult is it find a job when you speak very little Spanish? I am project manager (have been working mostly on internet related projects) and my boyfriend has been working in logistics and transport.
We are about to start Spanish language course in February which we will attend for a year. We than go travelling for 6 months so we will have pretty long break from learning the language. We than want to take 2-month full time Spanish course in Spain. So hopefully at the end of that we will both confidently speak some basic Spanish.
What do you think?? Any chance for a good job for us?? And the last thing - we are thinking about moving to Valencia
Thanks
Magda

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Posted: 04 January 2008 02:36 PM   [ # 1 ]  
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I don’t think you can hope to get professional jobs in Spain unless you speak fluent Spanish, you find a post with an international company with an English-speaking culture, or you have a skill which is very, very valuable and rare.  (For instance I know people who work in film-making in Spain who didn’t speak much when they arrived, but that’s a small and specialised industry.)  You could get work, right enough, but it will be unskilled (and minimum wage in Spain is ?600 per month, which is not much).  I know of Eastern Europeans (mostly Romanians and Slovaks, but some Poles) in Granada who have three jobs at one time - cleaning hotels, agricultural work and building labour.

Imagine what it would be like trying to get professional jobs in Australia without English….well the same applies in Spain without Spanish. (In some areas - including Valencia - there is a second local language to cope with too.) There are certainly people making good money who don’t speak Spanish, but they have built their own companies or develop and sell property etc., so you should consider those areas, maybe.  On the bright side, as Poles you are already bilingual and so language learning is probably easy for you, relatively…. You could always come to the UK - as Poles you have a right to find work here and the Polish community is big and thriving.  My local Polish bakery in Scotland is making lots of dough! (sorry…)

Incidentally, we knew a Polish family who bought a bar/restaurant in Malaga province.  The young kids learned Spanish very quickly, but the parents found it much more difficult.  There were comic scenes when the six year-old was taking orders for food and translating it into Polish for Mum and Dad at the bar.  Sadly they went out of business in under a year.

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Martin, Scotland and the Alpujarra.  http://www.casasierra.blogspot.com

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Posted: 04 January 2008 05:13 PM   [ # 2 ]  
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Yes I agree with the above post - we have a Spanish friend who cant get work in Barcelona because she does not speak Catalan!

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Rob
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Selling legal property on the Costa Blanca

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Posted: 04 January 2008 07:56 PM   [ # 3 ]  
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I agree with all of the above and certainly know others who can’t find work in Barcelona because of a lack of Catalan too (though not many).

If you’re doing project management on Internet projects then perhaps you can find freelance or remote work on the Internet. I’d consider that seriously from the sounds of it. Otherwise, chill out for 6 months while you pick up the language (go to classes! Intense ones!), then you’ll be in a much better situation for job hunting.

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