Ha, waar kom al die suid-afrikaners vandaan?
Eintlik probeer ek my broer te help.. hy's in Londen en ek in Den Haag, nederland. maar nouja laat ons nou maar internasionaal praat.
People who really want to get somewhere and persist do reach their goal. Doing something is better than nothing. Somewhere have differnt meanings to different people, the one would want a car, the other could have been to emigrate to another part of the world where you can better prolific your chances. Doing something can mean to start posting here on this website.
I too worked as manual labourer.
First priority. Get a desktop support job to pay the bills. You have great LinkedIn references from previous contracts. Desktop Support can be a curse and blessing. Its a curse if you work on auto-pilot resolving queries/calls/installing printers etc. A blessing is that you have income and notice patterns, procedures about things which happens regularly daily/weekly. That’s exactly the advice Guy Beauchamp gave in the podcast interview, by incorporating BA stuff into your daily work you have *some* experience. How did you get from being a manual labourer to "cushy” office job right in there in the financial markets? Not by sitting on your ass complaining.
Even I needs loadsa luck. In this country, the higher/manager/Bus.Analyst jobs are reserved for native speakers. Ex-pats or foreigners are relegated to operational level (hard core nerd programming jobs, office cleaners etc.) with no customer-facing contact. Many exp-pats here would affirm my opinion. I couldn’t find a BA job bcs of aforementioned reasons which left only 2 choices: 1. Starve of hunger, or 2. do shit sysadmin job. Reluctantly i accepted (2) while remaining solidly focused on being a BA.
Here's my recent experience;
When i started on that sysadmin job, the first thing on day 1 which i did was start asking about processes, responsibilities, stakeholders, functionality etc. basically i was practising my BA skills. I downloaded Visual Paradigm for UML and modelled the environment, my activities, actors etc. My colleagues werent impressed.. my team lead was kinda pissed off because they hired me for doing sysadmin. He said: "if i want to be BA then make a choice, either this or BA". You the reader of this post knows know, that BA jobs are for native speakers.
My lucky break came when went to fetch coffee overhearing two managers agreeing to hire a Bus.Analyst for a short period. I nearly dropped my coffee volunteering myself as candidate. Without even blinking, or asking a CV they gave me the job! From hearing the conversation to getting the job all happened within <=20 seconds!! 
A week later i was relieved of sysadmin duties to be fulltime BA. Unfortunately my contract is terminating in 2 weeks. Finding a BA job is once again gonna be a challenge. I compete against more experienced native speakers in a contracted market. Going back to software C#/ASP.NET software development isn’t my idea of progression. Recruiters don’t arent idiots they know you just wanna work and arent commited to dev/sysadmin jobs anymore.
What have i done/learnt in the past 6 months? Take advantage of *every* opportunity, no matter how small the chances are. If no opportunities exist then go create them for yourself!!
What i did the past 6 months;
* Be pro-active, eager, present yourself as a capable leader.
* Assumed project manager responsibilities (budgeting, setup meetings, planning, work breakdown structure)
* Did the BA job of scoping, requirements analysis, modelling UML, write use cases
* Assumed role of "internet router" connecting projects, people and activities to each other
My methodology recently was to look at BA job ads identifying skills in there which i lack. I would then IMMEMDIATLEY practice that skill on my current job adding it to my own skills portfolio.
Vat hom flaffie!!