Wednesday 29 June 2016

Looking for work in Israel

Well hello there weary blog reader, welcome to my humble blog.  Now you might be asking who is this person greeting you, well I'll tell you... I'm Batman..... okay I'm not really my name is Adam Pearlman originally from the UK, but now a settled resident living in Ramat Gan in Israel.  If your still reading perhaps I'll tell you something about me, that way you can keep reading :-).  I'm a Oleh Hadash having been here in Israel since October 2011, where I came to build a new life for myself.

So you could say I'm adaptable, after all moving to Israel and uprooting myself from everything I knew is a heck of a change, I'm also hardworking, I would like to think that I'm willing to put everything into the job I'm in, determined to succeed at the tasks I'm given and I think that is both relevant to me as a job and as a person here in Israel.  You need to be adaptable, you need to be determined and you need to ready to work hard to make it work.

I've brought with me experience in administration from working here in Israel and before in the UK for many years, in all that time I've found myself interacting with Owners, Managers and people of all levels, even managed to form personal relationships with some of them as well as professional relationships.  I've worked on projects as part of my experiences and even myself following from the beginning to end and seen my work become an official standard as part of the company.

Through my working experience and even before that I've always liked to write, even a few short stories and spent time in work experience at newspapers and radio stations and finally I translated that into this very blog you are now reading.. well I hope you are still reading.

Anyway that's enough about me, I hope I've intrigued you enough that perhaps you would like to get in touch, learn more about me, but now I want to focus on the title of my blog.  Looking for work in Israel is a tough experience, as I know others will attest to, just as they probably found it hard in their countries of origin.  To take your experience from working and move to another country and expecting that just a click of the fingers you will find your way into a job similar to what you were doing.

Experience here has taught me that its tough and sometimes even if you have everything they need, you might lack one thing.  For instance my Hebrew is functional but not fluent even though I work to improve it and I have found that has counted against me in job hunting when they want someone with a near native command of Hebrew, I'm fortunate in my current role my English is very needed as a Typist at an Intellectual Property Law Firm.  Apart from my duties of preparing emails, I am often called upon by other members of staff to check their English and correct as necessary or aid them in writing emails.  Its also handy for me to help other departments with their workload and even on occasion deal with incoming phone calls from the UK or other English speaking countries.

I've done a lot of different things since I came to Israel, my main roles as with England has been administration, whether its working on legal emails and such documentation in Bnei Brak or working in Binyamina and doing data entry and preparing sales quotes and invoices. To working for a company where I monitored game servers and tested them to see that they worked correctly and that was fun, especially for someone like me who enjoys playing computers.  So you can imagine how thrilled I was to be asked to spend 10 days playing a game to test it for bugs, I can only say that the amount of computer generated money I had at the start was doubled by the time I finished this project... if only it had been real and they had let me keep it LMAO.

And finally my other position in my time in Israel, a sales representative for Checkpoint.  It was a short term thing and in some ways I'm glad as it was not for me.  I do consider that I am a sales person, but I'm not a phone sales person, I'm a people person and I much prefer chatting with someone face to face than over the telephone, which is probably I enjoyed my two years of working at Toys R Us back in the UK after Middlesex University where I graduated with a B.A. Joint Honours in Media and Cultural Studies with Film Studies, learning such things as script writing and research methodologies.

Of course I worked before coming to Israel, for 6 years I was the Controlled Publication Distributor for Network Rail, dealing with 1500 people and over, interacting with members of staff across the country, and at all levels.  Okay I better explain what the job title is as people are probably wonder what that is.  Well, its Document Control, working in such an industry as the rail, there are rules and regulations for the safety of working, so my responsibility was to make sure everyone had the necessary information to do their job correctly.  I also acted as the administrator of the in-house database... meaning I had the power LOL.  Seriously though I was the main point of call for people using the database, assisting people with technical issues and helping people learn to use it.  Eventually I moved on and it always sticks in my mind that when my Manager found out I was leaving that he was sad to see me go as he knew I knew the job and didn't need to be managed by him, He knew that I could get on with it and manage myself without him needing to micro-manage me and only come to him with problems that I needed someone senior to handle.

I've also found here in Israel that computer skills are very good to have with Israel being a big hub of activity for companies such as Google, IBM and many others.  I've had a computer at home as long as I can remember and used so many versions of Microsoft Office that I would consider myself experienced in all the programs that are part of the package.  Of course I'm a tech geek, I'm never off the Internet and active in social media, not just here on my blog, but Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. I also find myself having learnt new skills through my work, like how to use a web based database and find search engines for finding people to add to work databases.  So I believe I have good computers skills that have served me well in the past and will continue to do so.

I honestly believe that if there is one thing I have learnt from work experience is that I can adapt and continue to learn new things, after all we never really stop learning, even if we have left School/University and that's what I want to do, show some new employer that I've got what it takes, that I can help their company grow and expand as much as I can grow and expand my horizons.

Thank you for reading.