Work experience visa experiences

[Cutmore]

Evening,

At some point in the future I would like to take part of one of the many working holiday experience programs, most so Australia.

I'm looking for people's experiences etc, got a blog? Let me have a read.

But one of the main questions I have that isn't often covered in the vast amount of blogs, how did you find returning to work? Did you find it a hurdle in continuing a career?

[Blown2CV]

no employer would count a year out or whatever negatively, you'll just be a year further back than you would have been, career wise... but with other positives to show for the year you spent. That bit isn't an issue.

[Willy Nilly]

I'm a farm worker, brought up on a farm. The first word I said was "tractor", probably "dacter". I collected many tractor sales brochures and the ones from the US had massive tractors working in massive fields. 10 year old me said "I'm having some of that".

One day I watched some National Geographic documentary on the US wheat harvest. They basically start in the south and work north, in this case in to Canada. I really needed to do this.

I'm not an outgoing or confident person and was much worse as a teenager. Anyway, time passed, I did YTS then onto college and still had a yearning for travel, but had hardly been out of the county under my own steam.

We were asked what we wanted to do with our lives at college and I said I wanted to go abroad for a bit. Fortunately agriculture is pretty widespread through out the globe and there are always labour shortages for various reasons and there are a few agencies and ways and means of getting work aboard.

Ohio State University do an Ag intern program and had a contact over here and she came to the college and gave us a talk. I wanted to go on the combines on the wheat harvest but got talked into working on a farm in Ohio.

When I went there I was incredibly nervous, could sleep for weeks on the run up and had never been to an airport before, never mind flown. I got there and started work. Didn't really enjoy it that much, it was ok when we were busy but I got very lonely and homesick. While I was there I was lodging in a house the got moved, then that house caught fire and burnt down so moved back, then moved again. Stressful.

The winter was very cold and the summer very hot. My time came to an end and I went down to Columbus and got my certificates signed. The guy running the program said he didn't think I'd had a very good time and he suggested going home as intended and applying to extend my visa so I could go on the combines. This I did and applied for my visa extension. However as my passport was damaged it was declined so I had to get a new one, so reapplied and they gave me a brand new visa. Get in!

OSU managed to get me on the best combine crew on the road and I flew back to the USA to Kansas on 1st of May 1997. He put us new lads through our truck tests and we were then in charge of brand new Peterbilt 377's with 430hp 60 series Detroits . Off down to southern OK for our first job and the pre harvest safety school. Then the work started. We had 6 brand new CaseIH 2188s to use and worked a lot of hours. My boss worked pretty closely with Case and got a few bits an pieces from the engineering department to test. Web worked like buggery for about 6 or 8 weeks then got caught up and rained out when we were in Nebraska where the pressure dropped a bit. Then on to Montana to cut malt barley for a few weeks. After that we had the long drive back to Kansas for fall harvest cutting crops I'd never seen in conditions I couldn't believe. There was a huge blizzard in October that dumped 2 feet of snow on us over night when we still had 2,000 acrs of crops to cut, having already cut over 20,000 acres.

While we were in MT we got asked if we wanted to come back, and or do something different. I said I'd love to come back next year and would like to do something I'd never get the chance to do again. So they got me a place on the LA Dodges baseball teams spring training ground in Florida where I spent a very warm winter tending the baseball pitches. While I was there I went to see an Atlas rocket an the space shuttle get launched. Then in the middle of April my mate from the harvest job collected me in his '84 Ponitiac Parienne and we set sail back to Kansas via Arizona and California and had a great time cruising around.

The second year on harvest was less of an adventure and more like a job, but I learned a lot more.

I've been home 19 years now and not a day goes by without thinking about my USA adventure. I cannot say for sure if it helped or not getting me a job. I was very unsettled for a long time after coming home. All I know is that even though I could have got myself on the housing treadmill instead of going abroad, the experience I got by going away have been absolutely priceless to me.

The job at work is a little shakey through things out of my control, so if it did all end, I'd certainly consider buggering off again.