Welcome to Living and Working in Switzerland

My "Swiss adventure" all started with a fairly innocuous recruitment agency call when I was 'between contracts':

If I could get you an extra £100 a day on your daily rate, would you consider working in Switzerland?

Well, duh! £100 a day extra? That should cover a cheap B&B and a cheap flight home every weekend, right?

Well, no! Unfortunately not.

I should have known better of course. It's not like I'm unfamiliar with the old maxim about recruitment agency reps: "How can you tell when a recruitment agent is lying to you?" (Answer: When you see his lips moving.)

But in my naivety I thought I was pretty experienced when it came to knowing the pitfalls of working abroad. After all, I've previously worked contracts in Ireland, Germany, the United States, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Switzerland should be no different, right?

Wrong!

It's different.

Very different.

Which is part of the reason for kicking off this blog to document 'my Swiss adventure' in something approaching real time.

I won't bore you now with the specifics of why, knowing what I know now, my advice to anyone getting an agency approach like the one I got would be to just hang up the phone as quickly as possible (assuming your interest in working in Switzerland is purely to pay the bills).

This introductory post isn't the place for that.

But money isn't the 'be all and end all' of living and working in Switzerland of course.

And that's part of what this blog will hopefully be documenting over time.