How to choose a country to migrate to
If you know you want out but are just not sure where to, here's a suggestion:
You can approach it by elimination.
The first step is to write down a list of your 15 preferred countries. No pressure here, it could be because of the beaches, the snow, the food, the tech industry, the beautiful people, the language, the sports, etc.
Then, you should remove the ones where you have no desire in learning the native language. Also, get rid of the worst performers on the Human Freedom Index, it's 2019, come on!
This is getting excited now. You should hopefully be able to close some of those Wikipedia tabs you opened and be left with 7 to 9 countries.
With this shortlist ready to go, it's time to do some serious research to make sure you will be able to pay the bills, wherever you go. As a next step, you should discover the most popular job website from each country and run the following job hunting experiment:
Update your CV (Ideally, a personal website instead).
Have a 5 starts Linkedin profile. You can also experiment with updating your current city to the major one in the destination country being tested.
Apply for job ads, but also pitch yourself directly to companies there.
The idea with the exercise above is to measure how the companies will respond to your professional profile and experience. It should be a great indicator of how each market is doing and where you might feel more comfortable to start networking.
To make things clearer, you should also research your chances of gettings a visa to work in each country. I've been building a tool to help with that.
So how about cutting out the losers here? Ideally, you will be down to your top 4 countries.
By now, you should be frenetically reading about your final candidates (hint: Quora is great for this). You should be ready to proceed through each option below until you're left with the winner:
I'm eligible for a visa.
The health and educational systems are excellent!
This is the safest place I've heard about!
That's my kind of weather.
The food is delicious and the natives are friendly (you can swap adjectives if you're single.)
(Insert your hobby here) is so popular.
This was very entertaining, but it's clearly just a start. You obviously know what you really care about in life and that's your north star.
I hope you land somewhere awesome!
Announcement:
We have launched our Private Facebook Group and it's currently open for the first 500 members. The idea is to have it as a private space where we can all discuss options for migrating around the world and help each other out. See you there.