Moving to the UK from Australia - Salaries and cost of living?

[honneamise]

Hi all,

I'm not entirely sure this is right place to put this in, but hopefully it is. I am a system admin/IT manager with about 20 years experience in IT and my wife and I are planning to move to the UK from Australia for a change. This is happening next year, around June. What id like to know is, what sort of salary ranges can I expect to ask for the sorts of roles I want to look at? Systems admin roles, IT manager roles, depending on organization and location obviously. What sort of salary will I need to bring in to survive that sort of thing? Obviously closer to the time we would be looking at applying for jobs, but im trying to get some info ahead of time so we know what to expect.

[elsiegee40]

Split into own thread

 

Hello and welcome to EduGeek.

 

The best thing you can do is browse our jobs forum to see the range of salaries on offer for various roles. I would also suggest that you keep an eye on some of the job websites. I suggest

 

The Guardian IT Jobs as a good starter across both private and public sectors and jobs.ac.uk for university and associated roles.

 

You will find your Australian Dollar stretches further here as the cost of living is lower than in Australia; my husband worked in Sydney for the best part of a year and found Australian prices expensive! The exchange rate is in your favour; the pound is struggling a bit and is likely to continue to do so due to Brexit.

 

There is a regional variation in cost of living and salaries too. London is way more expensive to live in and to commute to than other parts of the country. House prices and rent costs are higher in the commuter belt counties around London, but it still works out cheaper generally to live out of London and pay for the commute in.

 

Education, especially schools, tends to pay less than the private sector, so it really depends on where you work.

[Disease]

Don't do it, stay in Oz!!

[DJ-1701]

We actually have a TV show on the BBC here about people going to Australia... it's called 'Wanted Down Under'... most of the time it looks like it's much more cost effective over there, and higher pay.

[3s-gtech]

But it does rain here, which may be a nice change from certain parts of Australia at the moment! Salaries are highly regionally dependent, and for IT managers vary from around £25,000 to around £45,000 in the school and adverts I've seen. Because of the variations in cost of living in different areas, these may work out similar in actual terms.

[AlanD]

My daughter moved to - and lives in Australia...and I'd agree with what has been said....that cost of living is probably less...but cost of housing may be higher - depends on where you are moving from and to....The cost of housing the south, particularly south east of UK has become ridiculous....and probably unsustainable....although that sort it self out with some large drops after Brexit. But I would have though the quality of life (and weather) over here has nothing on that in Australia. Certainly in Perth - where my daughter is - she phones me up to complain when they have a cold day. When I ask how cold is cold...she said...oh its down to 20 today. Keep in mind that would be a relatively rare warm summer day in the UK.

[honneamise]

Thanks guys, much appreciated, we dont have to worry about kids, as all ours are grown up, and we do love Australia, the weather is great, but my wife has never travelled overseas, so we thought instead of saving for a short holiday and only seeing bits of the UK and Europe in a blur, we thought we would come over and see lots of it while we work at the same time. We are sort of doing what we should have done when we are 20, now that we are 45 and 50.

[CAM]

I'd wait for Brexit to get sorted first. Right now we have an anti-immigration government and nationalists popping up everywhere. Plus the worker shortage when key EU workers get kicked out by a dim-witted Home Office will work in your favour.

 

Alternatively work on the mainland where the quality of life is far higher and you get access to 27 other countries.