How is the job experience in the recent time?

Hello tomkuza036,

Welcome to Expat.com

Since your post already has a theme which is '' job experience'', please note that I have created a new thread with it on the Colombia forum.

This is the best way to get some feedback on this topic.

What do you do for a living?

Have you started your research?

All the best,

Cheryl

Expat.com team

You will be hard pressed to find work in Colombia as a foreigner or Expat, unless you are willing to work for $10US/day, and even then, employers will hire Colombians first.

If you are in the hospitality field, perhaps you have a better chance.

Hi there. Unfortunately, the labor market is currently oversaturated, and the situation may get worse. Thanks to scientific progress, in particular, the development of AI, several professions have already disappeared, and the situation will only get worse. 

    Hi there. Unfortunately, the labor market is currently oversaturated, and the situation may get worse. Thanks to scientific progress, in particular, the development of AI, several professions have already disappeared, and the situation will only get worse.          -@andrewnaum20

"...several professions have already disappeared, but other professions will be created and will need qualified workers..."

There, FTFY 😉

To wit: I'm an old-school IT guy, struggling to keep up with new technology. I see tons of job openings for front-end developers (Angular and React nonsense 😒 ), Big Data, and AI experts.

Meanwhile, my "bread and butter" skilset - mostly back-end .Net and SQL Server development - is oversaturated and not in high demand anymore. And I am not yet close to retirement age, so I do need income so I don't burn through my savings (albeit at a slower pace cuz I live here in Barranquilla, not in the dUSA).

Entonces... I'll likely have to abandon my plan of retiring early here in Colombia... I'll have to resume dedicating many daily hours to training and writing little "proof of concept" software for free, so that I can TRY to get a 100% Remote entry-level job in one of these new fields.

Frankly, I'm not looking forward to competing with the fresh-outta-college kids who are already familiar with Big Data Models, Python, R, and so on.

tl;dr... There ARE jobs out there... just not the ones that some of us are qualified for 😢

@tomkuza036

Have you  ever been  to the US border?

There are thousands of Colombians a month crossing illegallly, and many more Venezuelans.

There are a couple million Venezuelans in Colommbia.They usually undercut the minimum wage  which is about $300 US a month or less than $2 an hour.

Are you up to competing with the Venezuelans salary wise?

How is your Spanish level?

Yes, you are right. The competition is terrible now and it will get worse. The point is that you need to look for more highly specialized professions. This is the advantage of modern scientific development and globalization. You can grow up in a small town and not have an education. But you can get trained as an IT specialist (there are quite a few of them) and program, or do e-commerce, or study and integrate AI into various industries. I understand that a guy from college has more chances, but if it was 50 years ago, you had no chance to get out of there at all. You'd be working like everyone else on a ranch or in a local factory somewhere for a meager salary.

I myself recently got laid off and lost my job. I have many friends works in IT, so I decided to give it a try. Now I'm trying to choose a specific area and take courses. The AI field seems very attractive and promising to me, especially after the noise that ChatGPT has made. If you are also interested in this, you can read the article (https://integrio.net/blog/qualifications-ai-engineers). It is certainly a very complex area, but I think it is even more interesting.