Ciao

My name is Benjamin and I'm 24, I decided to move to London from Italy in 2018 and here is my story.

I thought of writing an article because looking now back after 2 years it was probably one of the toughest things I've ever done till now, and maybe my experience can inspire someone else :)

1. Prep Work

Before leaving your home, get as much as you can from where you live

Finished my Computer science school in summer 2015, in Italy we do 5 years of a specific course before Uni, I felt the freedom to choose whatever else I wanted. Uni was not an option as I did not have the money and from what I understood for us Dev's spending 4 years on books would be also risky.

I lived in a small town in north Italy just minutes away from the alps where, as for all the country, finding any job is quite a challenge.
Fortunately managed to land an interview with the only web agency in town and with a couple of good lies managed to get the job.

I was earning 300€, upgrading to 600€ after 1 year...I could barely pay my petrol to get to work but that was the price I knew I had to pay to learn the job and learn to code.

I learned how to code here, how to make websites, and how to abuse Jquery out of its limit. I learned to not edit bootstrap.min.css and I learned that what they thought us at school was so far from reality, working on real projects was way more fun.

After 3 years I was a pretty much confident full-stack dev, but what started scaring me most was that is wasn't learning anything new and that everything that I was doing was legacy compared to other countries in the world. Unfortunately, Italy is very behind on the tech side and companies don't invest much money to upgrade the coding stack.

2. Getting ready for the move

Before leaving your home, get as much as you can from where you live

I understood that the only way to keep my hunger for career progression was to relocate somewhere else.
I started filtering where could I move. First, my intention was Switzerland...near to home, a good salary, the language could be a problem but solvable. But man Switzerland is boring...I went scouting there for a couple of days but felt right away that was not going to work.

London, the big smoke, the biggest metropolis in Europe..moving from a little town in the alps was going to be a huge jump, but it was I city I was familiar with and in close distance from Italy, other than being the tech center in hole Europe

Flights booked, the countdown begins (Be aware of the seasons, moving to a new place in hot weather is always better).

So I knew I had some basic knowledge but was that going to be enough? I started putting my feet in this whole new world trying to have some interviews over the phone.
Not obvious to say, but when starting to job hunt from remote, be sure to have your Linkedin profile looking amazing, a well-structured CV, and most importantly your website displaying your portfolio. That is a MUST.

First-round was taking anything up that said Junior in the description, found on some random Job sites...but this first lesson thought me 2 main things:
1) I was going to be well more prepared for technical questions and general knowledge
2) Finding a Job is a Job, so it needed understanding, best practices, and filters.

At the time I was still working full-time so during lunch or after work was when I was giving all I had in this research.
The technical gap between London companies and the Italian ones was enormous, so in my free time, I was trying to grasp information here and there on what Laravel or VueJS were.

Another thing that took time to realize is that I was getting so many requests from Recruiters over LinkedIn, but then once on the phone talking with them, you just realize that most of them don't have a clue of what they are talking about, ending up in me having an interview with a totally out of focus company.

In less than a month, I learned to filter interview requests, be prepared on general questions, decrease my salary expectations (I was dreaming of at least 40k to start off with, but soon decreased to 28k!) and become a Ninja at coding tests.

Hope you are enjoying the story,
Let me know down in the comments if I should keep sharing my experience and what happens next!