im american and my wife is brazilian--we would love to open a retail clothes store or a lunchenette style food store either in sao sabastion or ilhabella

Originally posted by marley Of course it's different, but it's not a different planet. In UK, I have no experience and a good degree, looking for a job in a very bad economic climate. In Brasil, I have no experience and a good degree, looking for a job in a pretty good economic climate (especially in my field). Are you saying that nobody in Brasil has a job in the field they want to work in? Or that everybody who has, worked for 10 years in teaching and babysitting before landing that job?

Other posters are 100% correct when telling you Brazil IS, in deed, another planet when it comes to work.

Your typical 9-5 office job here is often 9-6:30 M-F and 9-1 on Saturdays.  The work week is 44 hours, lunch, which can be 1-1:30 hours isn't counted in that time and overtime is a common requirement. 

Depending on the job you might be asked to work on a "scala" - 6 full days 1 week, and 5 the next or 6 days on 2 days off on a rotating schedule.

Finding a job is not impossible, but it does take time.  Something like 80% of jobs here are never announced.  If a spot opens, they call someone they know (or someone who knows someone they know).  For people in your situation to get into an entry level job, it usually takes about 12-18 months.

Beyond that - you can forget your "good" education.  Brazilians don't care at all about Education - they see it as a way to collect pieces of paper and make contacts. It doesn't matter if you graduated from Oxford or Cambridge, for most entry level jobs, your degree means squat.

The people pushing you to be an entrepreneur have the right idea.  Working for someone else here sucks.  Employers treat you like you are expendable.  If you have a decent work ethic, they will exploit the hell out of you because most of your coworkers will be following the "lei do minimo esforco".

If you don't have the cash to start something upfront, look for jobs in the UK (and in Brazil) in an area where you think you could work for yourself.  Use a job in Brazil to make contacts and learn the basics of the bureaucratic ropes.   Keep relatively quiet as your boss exploits you - note if they are making you work dupla funcao, unpaid overtime, denying you your ferias, not paying you on the card, etc. and  quit and sue them and take your winnings to start your own business once you've got things planned out.

I bet half of the gringos in Brazil who own companies never imagined that they would before they came here and realized how much the job market sucks and how incompetent Brazilian business owners are (and therefore how easy it is to do a better job or provide a better service than them).

While it isn't impossible to find an ok job here, don't expect to follow anything like what you would imagine to be a traditional career path.

Why not take a gap year over here in Brazil? Come over and be prepared to make enough to live and have a good time. After a year, you'll speak great Portugues, know what it's like here and perhaps when you get back the job market would have recovered.

Originally posted by MaCCi_7 2. Because of the shortage of "good jobs" - competition is fierce. Do yourself a favour, get on Linkedin and look at some profiles of guys in your field. You will find that many (possibly even the majority) have several degrees, often from top US/Eur universities. With these degrees, native Portuguese (and, for said candidates, near-native English) and no visa requirements you can imagine how difficult it is to break into the job market here.

Totally agree on the business side (i.e. the boys/girls from good Brazilian families study abroad and come back to work in front office roles), but not on the IT side (the post is looking for a career in IT!) where most of the CVs I see are just a bunch of worthless pieces of paper, second order degrees and when put to the test they fail miserably on basic academic questions or are not able to explain what they were actually doing in their previous jobs. Most IT positions that require a strong professional (not the office boys that big companies in Brazil employ and the results are horrifying) stay open for several months because of the lack of strong professionals in IT that can speak a fluent English (of course fluent Portuguese is a given). Of course most Brazilian companies do not need strong IT professionals since the products/services they provide are abysmal.
An IT entry level job that I described above in a non-Brazil company in Sao Paulo is looking at total package of around 100k BRL net annually including the benefits of a registered job (health plan, food tickets, ...).

Edited by GGTrek - 25 July 2012 at 15:55