Petra and Saci wanted an English-speaking country and a calmer life. They went through the options the way a lot of careful people do, England came up and went out again with Brexit, Ireland’s housing crisis ruled it out, the United States never made the list. In the end it came down to Australia and New Zealand, and they chose New Zealand for the range of work and the quality of life.
What finally moved them from “someday” to “now” wasn’t one thing. It was a difficult boss, the way the pandemic was handled, and then the war in Ukraine. “We decided once and for all that if we couldn’t go to New Zealand, we’d go somewhere, but as far from Europe as possible,” Petra told me. When the borders reopened in the second half of 2022, they took it as their window. Now or never.
The slow part nobody likes
Here is the part of their story I want people to see, because it’s the part that makes most applicants quit.
Petra sent out more than a hundred applications. Many came back with the same quiet reason: you’re a foreigner. That’s a brutal thing to read fifty times. The temptation, at that point, is to conclude the market is closed and stop.
It wasn’t closed. Two things were in the way, and both were fixable. Her resume was formatted for the European market, which reads as foreign, and slightly off, to a New Zealand employer. And she wasn’t targeting the right positions, because she wasn’t yet sure where she fit in the local market. So we rebuilt the resume for New Zealand, worked out which roles to actually aim for, and made her occupation the centre of the strategy: it was on the Green List, New Zealand’s roster of in-demand jobs that opens a faster route to residence. That changed the odds.
Then the interviews started. We prepared for them properly, and the company that hired her could see her career path and recognised, quickly, that she’d be worth having.
I’ll add one thing about the years before that, because it matters. We first spoke while the borders were still closed. There was no point job-hunting yet, so the plan was different: I told her how much starting capital they’d realistically need, and then I checked in every six months to see if they were still committed. No pressure, no clock. When a move is years away, the honest advice is sometimes “not yet, here’s what to do in the meantime.”
Forty days
When it broke, it broke fast. The good offer came on a Friday, a role they’d struggled to fill for a long time. Petra had the weekend to decide, signed the papers, handed in her resignation on the Monday, and started gathering documents. The visa came through in three weeks. She was in the country within forty days of the offer, because the conditions were tightening after a cut-off date and we weren’t going to miss it. The residency application went in on time; the grant itself came in 2023, after a long wait in the queue.
Saci came on the partner visa, which is its own piece of work. New Zealand wants real evidence that a relationship is genuine, statements from people who know you, a history you can show. “I went through six years of our Google photos,” Saci said, “picked the right ones, and wrote the little stories next to them: how we met, how we got together, how we run a household.” It’s oddly intimate paperwork. It’s also exactly what makes the difference between a partner application that sails and one that gets queried.
Once they’d set up the apartment, Saci found work too, as a manual software tester, in a dog-friendly office testing veterinary software, which is about as on-brand a New Zealand job as I can imagine.
Auckland, on their own terms
They’re in Auckland now, and the goal is concrete: enough saved to buy a place within ten kilometres of the city, hopefully next year. They save about half their income to get there. “We know it’s expensive,” Petra said. “We’re not treating it as an investment, we want to live there.”
Not everything came easily. Petra hit a low around the six-month mark, work was hard, and it sank in that everyone who mattered was far away. She’d read enough to see it coming, so she got help before it got bad; her workplace provided a psychologist. Friendships took deliberate effort. Saci joined Facebook groups and interest clubs at work, became one of the organisers of a regular movie night, and the real friendships grew out of those repeated, low-key gatherings. “If you have the desire, you can build these connections,” Saci said. “But you do have to build them. They don’t just happen at this age.”
There are things they’d warn you about, too, the unpredictable Auckland rain, the cold thin-walled houses, the way the city assumes you have a car. But ask them what’s better and the answer comes easily: how green everything is, the beach twenty minutes away, the scenery, the relaxed pace, and a workplace where every nationality you can think of sits in the same room.
Their advice, distilled: be patient, budget honestly because the first six months are expensive even on a good income, do everything in small steps, and stay open, to new food, new ways of communicating, a new sense of what “urgent” means. “We were used to ‘urgent’ meaning yesterday,” Petra laughs. “Here it means: can you do it by Friday.”
If you’re applying from overseas and hearing nothing back, it’s worth getting a second pair of eyes on the resume and the targeting before you conclude the door is shut. You can see how I work, or send me a few details and I’ll tell you, plainly, whether I think there’s a way through.
