Tips for getting your first job in Austria

Hi,

What are your tips and advice for getting a first job in Austria?

What are the job hunting steps to follow? Where to look for offers: newspapers, Internet, recruitment agencies, word-of-mouth?

What are the top hiring sectors?

What would you recommend to young professionals wishing to start their career in Austria?

Thank you in advance for your participation!

As Austria's mother tongue is German, a good start is learning the language. Latest Austrian unemployment figures for last month show that the number of jobless is continuing to rise.

It does depend on your field of work, if you know English plus another language thats always good and if you know German that a bonus.
Even the basic jobs that do not involving speaking German like washer up, house keeping, they ask for german speaking people.

The local Job Centre (Government= website is good to look at www.ams.at

It does tend to be word of mouth in finding a job, so if you join a community of your birth country thats always a good start. Go to your embassy and they will have contacts for them. 

Some other links

Virtual Vienna - Jobs

The Local - Jobs

I hope this helps

Simon (British Expat living in Austria 6.5 years)

It is not easy to get onto the job market in Austria, without being up to B standard in German. AMS the unemployment agency will send you on free courses to learn German. Jobrapido.at is a good general employment agency with diverse jobs available. Newspapers are a reasonable source of job ads-ie Salzburger Nachrichten for the Salzburg area, Kleine Zeitung for Graz, and more high power jobs probably der Kurier, die Presse, or der Standard would be good starting points.Good luck to all!

Universities and FHs usually organize Job fairs, these are a good starting place, and this is how I found my job. You don't need to be a student to come to the fair but the jobs there are usually targeting non experienced people. It is still a way to learn about companies in your sector.
German knowledge is very important.

Depending on the sector, there are Jobs in high demand and jobs that are not. The immigration regulation for non-EU residence will have information on how to apply for a visa if you are a highly skilled worker or your domain is in high demand. If you fall into that category, you will not need to find a job to live in Austria, this makes the job search a lot easier.