[IxDA Discuss] International Jobs

[Peter Boersma]

Rob asked:
>  What is the feeling of the job market abroad, versus in the US?

When I last spoke to a considerable number of people in our field (at the IA Summit) I heard a similar story as what I see here in The Netherlands:
- a bunch of "old-timers" (some with maybe 10 years in the business, others are really old ;-))
- a gap
- a whole lot of youngsters (some with maybe 2 years in the business, or with 2 years prior experience but now working elsewhere, others really fresh out of school)

The old-timers are working at agencies or have co-founded smaller businesses or are working as a well-paid freelancer.
The gap makes it hard for the old-timers to hire the youngsters because they look so unexperienced and there is no-one else to mentor them.
The youngsters have been told in school that they are the new gods of the web; they will be great project managers (really, all of them!) or at least great conceptual thinkers. They also have trouble starting with a sitemap before they do detailed wireframes.

Oh, and one reason to not post to an international list: a lot of clients ask for local-language documentation and presentations and I can certainly understand that in the area of interaction design where a good sense of language and culture are very important for the end-result.

> I am planning to relocate to Sweden/Denmark next year. Can you offer any
> recommendations of companies, job opportunities, job listing sites?

- SIGCHI.DK has a job board here: http://www.sigchi.dk/jobs/index.html (how's your Danish?)
- Sweden has 2 prospective SIGCHI chapters (West Sweden and Stockhol, although the latter seems alive: http://www.stimdi.se/)
- There's also the Swedish chapter of IxDA: http://sweden.ixda.org/index.shtml (or, in english: http://sweden.ixda.org/english.shtml)
- Hans de Graaff's HCI Index lists groups in both Denmark and Sweden here: http://degraaff.org/hci/groups.html
- the Euro IA conference in Barcelona is a good place to network (http://www.euroia.org)

I am sure that if you contact some locals, they will provide you with more resources.

Peter, old-timer
-- 
Peter Boersma | Senior Interaction Designer | Info.nl
http://www.peterboersma.com/blog | http://www.info.nl