employment in italy
and rome - part 4

opportunities in tourism
and language teaching

There are always lots of lower paid teaching jobs available in Rome that don't require the elusive ‘TEFL’ language teaching qualification. For example, sometimes Italians will pay just for someone to have private English social conversation with. This is obviously easy money, and you'll make a useful Italian friend into the bargain, as well as picking up a lot of info on Italian culture.

Check the classifieds in Wanted In Rome’ for such openings, and also try an Italian search engine such as http://www.virgilio.it and run a search on something like "scuola lingua Inglese Roma", or some such similar words.

The other quick route to a job in Rome is in the tourism biz here, which obviously is huge - You can make quick and easy money as an unqualified tour-guide for some of the fly-by-night package tour companies. But make sure they pay you properly and fairly, in advance if possible.
There's a lot going on here, but you have to actually be here with your ear to the ground, really, it's the only way.

salaries

Italy is not a land of milk and honey. Wages here are not double what they are at home, or anything like that, so don’t pay much heed to such myths.

On the whole, in official wages, you will probably earn slightly less in Italy than you might at home. This is because Italian employment and political culture has 'back doors' built into it enabling people to cut corners and rake in extra income here and there though things like tax evasion, embezzlement, inside dealing, trade-union action, mutual back-scratching and nepotism. The average worker in Italy is expected to fiddle extra income or time off through a myriad of little illegal shortcuts like this, so official wages are lowered accordingly to balance what the employee is expected to make through the back door.

Your disadvantage as an immigrant is that you won't know what all these money-saving fiddles are, and you may not have any useful friends to arrange favours for you at first.

Neither will you know at first where all the best deals are in local stores and services where you live. You may have credit in the bank, but credit with your community is just as important in Italy. Striking up friendships with local green-grocers, hairdressers and washing-machine repair men that you can trust, takes time, and is even harder in a foreign language.

For this reason, your first year in a strange new country could cost double what it might cost you in your second or third year, when you will be more settled in and protected (through experience) against local rip-offs.

I know Italians who, on paper, earn very little here, however, they have things like friendly dentists who charge them next to nothing for all their family's dental care, and never press for a bill. I also know of Italians with friends who work in a hospital who can arrange free specialist consultancy and treatment. So, what they don't earn in wages is made back in savings like this. That's how it works here.

You may not have such useful friends here at first. It takes time to build them up, so hold out and negotiate to press a potential employer for the highest possible salary you can, because as newcomers, for your first year or two in Italy, you will for the reasons given above need more nett salary than an established Italian doing the same job. Try to subtly impress this fact upon your potential employer, especially if you are someone who an Italian company has specifically head-hunted from your home country - If your work is truly valuable to the Italian company that has sought you out, your demands for an equal standard of living with your Italian peers should be met.

If you feel you have the financial capital, speak good Italian, and are bringing innovative new skills in some trade or profession to Italy you may consider starting up in business for yourself here and thus providing better and more modern services and equipment in this field than are currently available in Italy. This could be very lucrative.

For instance, air-conditioning is a growing industry here (it gets incredibly hot in summer in city centres) and someone with a fresh and competitive approach could clean up the market. You may do better like this than working for an existing Italian company.

But research things carefully, and watch out, because Italians are bad losers, resent criticism and hate outside competition, and existing practitioners in the industry here may band together against you. When IKEA opened here a few years ago, rival Italian furniture stores based in the same area banded together to make a trumped up charge that IKEA had broken local building and city-planning laws by building such a big store. Coming from Romans, this was such a laughable case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Just recently, Romebuddy had a virus attack from a rival Italian website that gives Rome tourist information.
And when the South Korean football team knocked Italy out of the World Cup in 2002, there were no handshakes and shirt-swapping between the rival players. Instead, the Italians immediately left the pitch. Italian TV coverage of the event did not even play back replays of the winning goal against them. Commentators simply sat around in the studio with pinched, hurt-looking faces black with anger, playing back goals Italy had scored in previous matches, discussing what they saw as the unfairness of the referee, and exclaiming that the match in question had been "not really football".

So watch out, because Italian business-people play a little bit dirty, hate to be beaten at anything they consider 'their own game', and though professing to embrace free enterprise, whenever faced with real competition, they soon slip back into that strange Italian political cocktail of communistic cosa nostra.

...click for more about working in rome, italy