Manuel Valdez from Manila, in the Philippines

Recent immigrant Manuel Valdez says Careers Services staff helped him quickly get to grips with the New Zealand job market.

Within a week of arriving in the country from the Philippines, Manuel visited the Career Services website, booked into a seminar and picked up some welcome advice about writing his CV and preparing for a job interview.

Shortly afterwards, Manuel got part-time work and a few months later secured the full-time job he wanted as an investment marketing executive. “For me, it was a 100 percent success rate,” he says.

Manuel is quick to credit Career Services staff for helping him achieve his goal.

“They have a good pool of consultants with good networks. One of them helped me get an interview for the part-time job doing market research, and three days later, I got the job.”

Consultants also politely pointed out that Manuel’s CV, which stretched to a sizeable 15 pages, was perhaps just a bit too detailed. “When I showed my CV to them they said ‘You know where that will go? Into the dustbin’. They told me here you need, at the most, two to three pages.”

Manuel says he really valued the regular communication he had with the consultants.

“Their programme is very helpful for new migrants. They kept on touching base as much as possible. They wanted me to be in the loop with developments, improvements and what was happening in the job market.”