Getting a student visa is a great way to find out what it’s like to work in Australia.
If your application for a student visa is successful you can work up to 40 hours a fortnight when your class is studying and full-time when your class is on holidays.
The experience of working in Australia is unique, and a memory you will keep forever.
The rule used to be that you could only work 20 hours a week, but that was inconvenient for employers, so the rule was changed to 40 hours a fortnight.
Academique is located on the beautiful Gold Coast, so summer is the time when it’s really busy. There’s plenty of work for students in restaurants and cleaning jobs because we get lots of visitors. So we have the maximum amount of holidays for students: 8 weeks.
It’s very important to follow the conditions of your student visa: Immigration can easily check your payslips. Employers must follow the rules and cooperate. Most employers simply won’t give you more than the legal number of hours.
Some positions are contract work, and the hours are not recorded, but you can be asked to provide a reasonable estimate of the hours involved.
The good news is that there are many students on the Gold Coast, so employers are quite used to the rules, and it’s not difficult to find work on the Gold Coast.
Most students looking for work in Australia just print many copies of their resume and drop them in to suitable places. The important thing is to get your first job: once you have a job you can move to a better one when the opportunity arises.
And it’s very important to get a job in summer and be great at it: Employers keep the best workers for the cool winter months.
Of course, your expectations should not be too high. If you were a patent lawyer in Romania, you are not likely to find work as a patent lawyer in Australia. Many things will be different from your home country. Cooks, waiters and waitresses, cleaners, welders, tilers, carpenters, mechanics, massage therapists: these are all jobs students can do without much English, and where the systems seem pretty similar all over the world.
When you arrive ask your teachers and classmates how people find work in Australia. For example SEEK and GUMTREE are very popular. Ask our English teachers to check your resume.
