I've been hanging around the forum for a while and finally decided to post. I've been to Brazil a couple times, about a month and a half each visit, and I would like to try to move there. I stayed primarily in the Rio area, Barra da Tijuca e Pedra de Guaratiba but I've been to SP spent a few weeks in Minas and so forth. I've been learning Portuguese for about 4 years now, so I like to think I'm conversant, and I do have a pretty large network of friends there in Rio. All of my friends there recommend teaching English, but with what I've read from this site and others, I'm thinking that may not be the best idea. My professional background in in mechanical engineering, I have a experience machining, designing, and using a various CAD softwares (autocad, solidworks, inventor ...) As the industrial sector has been growing rapidly recently, I thought maybe my experience in the engineering field would be more marketable than a TEFL certificate. The one concern I have though, is that I only have an associates degree and I'm not sure how that would translate. I am a certified Solidworks users (took their training classes and test) so I don't know if that would help.

As a brief outline of my plans, I'm going back down to Rio in May for about a month and plan to try and set something up for sure in terms of a job a and place to stay. My move is primarily to do volunteer work, but I need a job to care for personal expenses and to get a visa. If everything works out, I would file all my paper work when I get back to the states and hopefully make the permanent move around the end of the year. I of course am saving up money to be able to support myself for about 6 months or so if necessary and I would be willing to pay for the immigration attorney and associated cost if a company were to sponsor me. I just want some input from others to see if this plan even makes any sense. Thanks in advance.

There is hope:

Edited by brlife76 - 07 February 2012 at 21:08

There are many opportunity in mechanical engineer work. You have better skill in cad design you get better job in this field. You search job by local job search engine website.