June 27th this year will be a special day for Sydney based Gaurav Wadekar, who works as a business project manager at Sydney Airport.
“On June 27th, it will be exactly a year since I started the free Meetup events to help other newly arrived migrants find work in Australia,” Wadekar tells SBS Hindi.
Wadekar had moved back to India after spending a few years in Australia but decided to come back in 2017.
“In 2012, we went back to India to be with our family. But in 2017, we thought of moving back to Australia, especially for our children,” Wadekar says, who hails from Vadodara in Gujarat.
Like most migrants who come from India, Wadekar’s first priority was to get a job to support his family.
“I arrived on 5th June 2017 and on 12th June, I got a full-time role as a business analyst at Sydney airport,” he says.
Wadekar says getting in touch with his established network in Sydney and reaching out to them with his resume that highlighted his skills helped him get a job in the first week after landing here.
He then thought of voluntarily organising a free Meetup event to help other migrants find a job in Australia.
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“My first meetup event was on June 27th, 2017 and in a year’s time our group has grown to 1160 members and I have helped more than 20 people find their $100,000+ jobs,” Wadekar claims.
His events discuss different aspects of ‘navigating the sometimes tough Australian job market’.
“Our sessions are mainly based on how to write your resume, what recruiters think and how they work, how to look for jobs according to your skills and how to approach employers,” he says.
“We often invite speakers from their field of expertise to guide the migrants and these events are completely free,” he adds.
How to find work in Australia?
“Most of the times we look for jobs according to our current or previous designation instead of skills. The position we held in India or abroad may not be exactly the position advertised or required in Australia.
We need to focus our job hunt based on our skills rather than position,” Wadekar says.
He claims this approach has helped newly arrived Indian migrants immensely.
“Recently, an Indian-origin lawyer who had worked in Dubai migrated to Sydney. He approached me and is today working with Commonwealth Bank of Australia earning more than $100,000+ in salary after we helped him match his skills with the kind of jobs available in the market,” he says.
It is all about the way you approach job hunting, he says.
