Q & A

Subject: Dream of working in France.

Question: Thanks for putting together an informative site on France. I have been searching the web looking for information on living in France and have discovered many sites with more content than yours, but much less informative. I appreciate your one on one style. My question for you is regarding employment. I have a dream of moving to France and finding a job is critical to making that happen. I have 5 years of experience as a network engineer and systems administrator and I would assume that I would be the most employable in this field. Is there a market for Americans with computer experience? If so, what would be the best place for me to look?

Answer: Thank for your positive comments about my site. As for your question about there being a market for Americans with computer experience, I would say yes but not as much as one might think. I am network administrator with four years experience and it took me four months to find a job. That was a lot longer than I though it would take. I was looking in Strasbourg and a lot of the companies that I look into only had offices in Paris. So I might have had better luck looking in Paris, it is also the economic center of France.
A lot of the jobs that I saw ads for, wanted people with experience in UNIX or people that knew programming languages like C or C++. If you have those skills you might be able to find a job faster than I did.
Remember, even if the language of computers is English you are still going to need to be able to speak French. In my job, everything is in French, even if the people all speak some English I still have to work in French, that can be very tiring.
On my web site there are two Q & A's you should have a look at, Working in Paris and Working in France. Also have a look at the following web sites,

France 101 - A six-day long conference focusing on everything you need to know live in France.