I’m currently Uk based, and am open to the idea of moving abroad to expand my life and work horizons.
I have been warned by my colleagues that the work/life balance is terrible for my counter parts in in America.
At the moment, I work 38 hour weeks, and I am not expected to work overtime. I have 30 paid vacation days off. Including an additional week for Christmas, and around 8 bonus bank holidays scattered thou out the year.
How does this compare to my counterparts on your side of the pond?
4 comments
Cool story
It depends on your profession. I work at a traditional corporation.
I have good work/life balance. I work from home. Working 80hrs/2 weeks with flexible schedule so I tend to work 9hrs/day from Monday-Thursday and work 4 hrs on Friday. Sometimes I take Monday or Friday off for long weekend and make-up hours during the week. I have 18 days paid time off, 10 holidays and 1 week of Christmas.
“STEM” is very vague. Could be a million jobs with a million different requirements. Particularly stuff like whether you’re expected to work more than 40 hours a week, whether you’re expected to be available by email on weekends, etc. varies a lot from job to job.
I will tell you one thing though, you are not getting 30 paid vacation days in the US. Not going to happen. There are some jobs, particularly in tech, that offer “unlimited paid time off” but just know that it’s very unusual for Americans to actually take anywhere near that much time off, even when they’re allowed to. If you actually go and do that, it may very well raise eyebrows among your supervisors, and probably even more so your coworkers.
For a high skilled job of the type that is going to be hiring European immigrants, plan for 15 vacation days a year, plus 7 or so national holidays. If that’s going to be a deal breaker, the US is not for you.
BTW getting a skilled work visa for the US is not a walk in the park. Have you investigated this and thought about what your strategy will be? If not, this is the most important thing to be researching. No point in worrying about work life balance in the US if you won’t even be able to go in the first place.
You’re not going to notice any major differences. Did your colleagues see that in a movie? I don’t know where people get this stuff. As long as you’re not working somewhere for the glamour of it and you have the ability to separate yourself from your work, you’ll be fine. You’re probably not going to get 30 days + 1 week of vacation, but you’ll probably also only be putting in 30 hours of real work a week in an office job, if that.