Salary and growth as an immigrant

[Harpa Timsah 13,258]

My husband got a good job fairly quickly, and he is still working at the same place. They were happy to get him and not have to sponsor for H1B, and they asked him if he had friends that were interested in moving to the US on H1B because they were so impressed with his work and training and wanted more people like him.

My husband tells me that in software developing, foreign degrees are in demand and that he works with a lot of Russians.

One of the biggest mistakes I see here on VJ is having a bad-looking or unintelligible resume. There was a women on here with a German husband who kept talking about his "degree in international shipping and coordination and product inventory control" or something long and silly like that. She was making a big deal of the "degree" (which had no "type," not a bachelor's or anything with a name). I thought about it for a bit and I asked her what it really was, and I guessed that it was something like he was trained to work in a stockroom, and she said yes. So here was this guy whose training was in being a stockroom attendant, something that here I don't think even requires a HS diploma, and she was trying to make him look extra trained and give him a "degree." Apparently in Germany, people get training for every job, even menial ones, so that was his "degree," and they call it a degree there, though I wonder if it was a bad translation. He would have been better off just saying "training in stockroom and inventory control" as a line item on his resume, to show his training, instead of trying to directly translate the "degree" he had (which seems like it was more of a certification for a particular job). It would read to a US-audience as a BS line item, and she was really hanging her hat on that item.

Similarly, I see a lot of people from the UK who want to put their A-levels and claim that A-levels are somehow university level.

I see people who put their DOB and marital status on their resume. No. That just makes you look unprofessional and gets your resume in the bin.

So this OP says that her foreign qualifications are unintelligible, so I say she needs to make them understandable to a US audience, as a first step.

A lot of immigrants also do something that I think is a mistake, that they try to get a job that is below them because they are new, but they show their qualifications. Then they look overqualified and no one wants to hire an overqualified person. So the immigrant thinks "I can't even work as a cashier!" but they should look for something more closely related to what they did at home. I also am in a field with a lot of educated foreigners, so I don't think an immigrant should expect to start from the bottom or be a janitor. If you were a doctor in a third-world country, then maybe you can't be a doctor here without more training, but for many many jobs, that isn't the case.

OP: If you like, put what you have on your resume here, and people can see if it is understandable.

[AmyWrites 593]

Just watching the Big Bang Theory and they had the episode where the Russian Physicist was a Janitor at the University. And knew the answer to the final quiz question.

The guilt of knowing I may have done just that to my husband by moving back to the US depresses the life out of me sometimes.

[TBoneTX 45,962]

The guilt of knowing I may have done just that to my husband by moving back to the US depresses the life out of me sometimes.

Avoid thinking like this. To hell with movies and TV programs. Focus on real-life opportunities.

[EmigratingSwede 16]

I moved from a mid level IT job (software/telecom) to a Senior level job in the same field. My salary increased from about 65k to 83k (86k now after a little less than a year). I was fortunate to find such a good job in only a few months. In my case it was mostly due to having some rather rare skills.

I got my job through a recruiting agency. I had applied for the same job myself without being called for an interview, but when the agency brought me in as a candidate for the job I ended up getting the position. I had signed up on the agency website and they actually contacted me and asked me to consider applying for the position.