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Expat Guide For The Single Technician
Are you single? Are you currently in the military or have military experience? Are you a technician? A single person who has technical experience and is currently a member of the military or have had experience in the military you have a bright future as an expat. If you are married or have some other expertise other then electronics or networking you can still have a career as an expat but this article is for the single technician. There are plenty of companies out there that have government contracts and need people willing to travel and live in foreign countries. They also need people who know how the military dose business. Whether you only spent four years or twenty years if you have an honorable discharge government contracting is an option that you should consider.
Why
am I a good candidate for these positions?
Being single makes you a lot more mobile then the person who is married. You are also willing to go to more places and willing to live in harsher conditions then the person who is married. If you are willing to live in a barracks or tent a lot more options open up for you in the contracting world. Some contacts out there are considered unaccompanied and will not let you bring a family with you. These types of contracts are in dangerous areas or in very remote areas but are the kind of contract you can get a lot of experience. It is somewhat hard to fill these positions and if it is one in a remote location you may have to do a lot of things that you did not get hired to do. This lets you learn new skills that you can add to your resume. On this kind of contract you can move around from department to department rather easily if you show you can learn things rather fast. The more you learn the more marketable you make your self. The dangerous locations are about the same as the remote locations and may be remote as well. The only real difference is the danger and the fact you get paid a lot more then if you were just working in a remote location.
Locations where you get danger pay vary in
danger. If you find that
you are willing to take risk if you get paid enough you can also
decide what level of risk you are willing to take.
For example if you take a job in Kuwait you will get less
danger pay then if you lived in Iraq but you will also be relatively
safer. At that point you
have to decide if the difference between what you make in
No mater what you decide you will be provided housing, transpiration, and a lot of the times chow hall privileges. Now the dinning hall may not be a five star restaurant or even a two star depending on the where you go but it will be free. The foreign earned income exclusion is a huge tax break as well. According to IRS.gov in 2008 the first $87,000 you make is not taxed if you meet the requirements. We will cover the foreign earned income exclusion in a separate article next week. This means if you meet the requirements and you make less then $87,000 a year you will not have to pay any federal taxes on your income. This is only to be excluded from your income not other investments like stocks, bonds and your house. It also only covers your federal taxes you will have to pay state taxes if your state requires you to do so. If you make over $87,000 you only pay taxes on your income after your first $87,000. You can basically just do your job find a hobby or two and save money. This is great to pay of any debt you have accumulated over the years. If you put yourself on a strict budget you can conceivably use most of what you make to pay off debt and just save enough to pay what little taxes you will have.
It is great when you are able to pay of most or all of your debt but the experience you gain will be priceless. On these kinds of contracts if you are a technician and understand signal flow you can easily transfer to new departments when opening become available. If you show you can learn new things and that you are a good worker they will not think twice about moving you to a new position. You can start out in a technical control facility and end up working at a radar site. You would be hard pressed finding this kind of opportunity in a company state side. You will also notice that in some locations you are able to do component level maintenance not just replace a card and send the bad one out for repair. State side a technician that can perform component level maintenance is a dyeing breed with companies now just replacing cards and equipment rather then performing maintenance. By troubleshooting at the component level you gain a much better understanding of your equipment.
Having prior military experience you already know how the military dose business. It is not always the same as civilians are used to and a lot of civilians can not adapt to the military way of doing things. Since the customer of these companies are the military they want people they know can keep there customer happy and being able to do things the way the military wants it done is key to customer satisfaction. There are civilians who can do this but when they have a choice between someone without military experience and someone with military experience they will take the person with military experience most of the time. Another big bonus you have being prior military is the fact you have experience working with the equipment the military uses. There is equipment that is used that you would not have had any experience with unless you were in the military. All of this adds up to you looking very good as a potential employee.Pages: [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ]
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