I do know a few people who’ve worked diligently and carefully to maneuvre themselves into overseas job positions, but for the majority a relocation offer from your company (or a company which wishes to recruit you) can come as something of a surprise.

There is a lot to think about if you have the opportunity to relocate, and unraveling all the knots can be difficult, particularly if there’s some pressure to provide an answer to the offer.

I’ll admit that it didn’t take me long to accept my own offer verbally, in principle. It was made on a stifling Friday afternoon in a Sunnyvale conference room; I accepted the offer on the following Monday. My reasoning was simple – this was potentially a unique offer. If I moved to California and hated it, I could always move back. If I declined, I was left with a potential lifetime of “what if?”s.

Nevertheless, the process of moving is a complicated one, and it’s worth being prepared for all the steps.

Out of the blue just recently, I got a comment on a rather old article, from someone called Ian

Ian wrote:

Hey – i found this blog while searching for information on moving to Northern California from the Uk…

Similar to you, I have been offered the chance to move with work out there, and would love to hear any tips/reccomendations you can give!

There are various nuggets of information buried in articles on this site, but I thought that for Ian’s sake (and given the seeming rise in Valley-bound immigrants blown here by bubble2.0) I’d re-capture some of the advice as concisely as possible.

There are 3 posts I’m going to write on this subject, each covering 5 useful areas that I think every immigrant should know about. This is all (as always) from the point-of-view of an Englishman relocating to Northern California, but I hope that it’s useful for any English-speaker who might be pondering a relocation to the US.

The first two parts are now available. Part III is coming Real Soon Now(TM).

• Relocating, Part I (“before you move”)
• Relocating, Part II (“arriving in America”)
• Relocating, Part III (“settling down”)

In addition to the points I cover here, I’ll provide one book reference:

“Living and Working in America” by David Hampshire (Survival Books, ISBN 1 901130 61 4)
[On Amazon UK | On Amazon.com ]

I can’t recommend this book highly enough – it answers almost every question you could have, and is a big comfort to have around as a reassuring advisor whilst you’re leaping into the unknown.