How we chose a region before we chose a house

My wife has wanted to move to Australia for a long time. She brought it up every so often but we never really investigated or took it seriously.

On the walk to our local pub quiz one evening she mentioned the idea again (we use the walk to the quiz, and time before the quiz starts, for life admin. Usually involving getting round to paying the childcare bills for our sons). This time was different, I don’t know what changed but we decided we should give it a go. It seems like this is our window to actually make this happen and the time in our lives where we can make this work. By the end of that week she was emailing recruiters and joining the Facebook groups to gather information and connections.

She is a UK-trained GP, two years post-CCT. Before that she was an obstetrics and gynaecology registrar. I am an app developer focusing on iOS and Apple development to paint the picture.

The visa is key and dictates everything that comes after it, so that’s where we started.

There are many different routes to take and the one probably most familiar to people is the points based route, where you gain points depending on things like age, skills assessment and English language proficiency. It is the slower way to go about getting a visa, you have to make sure you’re on the skills shortage list and hope for an invite to apply eventually but there’s no guarantee, and a doctor doesn't really need this route. Clinics need doctors and sponsor all the time. So the only question for us was which sponsored visa.

A 186 takes you straight to permanent residency which brings a lot of stability and removes much of the uncertainty of living in Australia. We ruled it out because it takes longer than other visas, is more involved and is more expensive too. We went for a 482, the skills in demand visa. It is a temporary visa and tied to the clinic that nominates you but it can lead onto a 186 later anyway after certain conditions are met.

I will be on this visa as her dependent with full work rights, so I can work for anyone once we are there. Her job still comes first and the rest of our life gets arranged around wherever that job is allowed to be.

A lot of the simplification of the visa process is a UK thing as opposed to a medic thing as far as I can tell. Being UK trained puts her on a quicker registration path than doctors from a lot of other countries get so I would not assume any of it reads the same way if you trained somewhere else.

I also didn't understand how much work that word allowed was doing.

I started on Seek looking at the current market for Staff/Principal/Senior iOS Engineer roles and the answer came back as almost entirely Sydney or Melbourne based. Not mostly. Almost entirely. That one search set the boundary for everything, before we had thought about a single suburb.

We ruled out Melbourne relatively quickly, and I won't pretend it was rigorous. Good weather is one of the main reasons we want to go, and the more we read about Melbourne the more we hit the same phrase, "Four seasons in one day". A climate people describe as closer to Europe than to what we were picturing. My wife had also been to Sydney years earlier on an elective (which is the placement medical students arrange abroad near the end of their training) and loved it there.

That was the extent of the analysis. We ruled out a city of five million people on vibes. If you do this yourself you will probably do something similar, so be honest with yourself about which of your decisions were the careful ones.

So we had New South Wales, and that is where the research really started.

Her constraint

She couldn't take a job in central Sydney. There is a classification called Distribution Priority Area, or DPA, which the government uses to steer doctors towards the places they are needed most. International medical graduates are restricted under section 19AB of the Health Insurance Act 1973, and working in a DPA location is what makes them eligible to access Medicare. Central Sydney isn't short of GPs, so central Sydney was closed to us.

If you want to check a place properly, the department publishes a health workforce locator that tells you how somewhere is classified.

My constraint

Any role I get is probably going to be hybrid, with office days in the Sydney CBD. My limit was 75 minutes each way but ideally I want to minimise this as much as possible.

When you put those places on the same map you get the thing I wish we had known in week one, her constraint pushes outward, away from the city, mine pulls inward, towards it. They are not the same pin.

Also where my wife works and where we live are two different questions, and nearly all the advice out there treats them as one.

Knowing that didn't give us an answer. It gave us a month of map work, six recruiters, and a region neither of us had on a list. That is part two.