Porto Alegre Travel Forum

Good day everyone,
I am new to this forum and just have a couple of questions on moving to Porto Alegre. My girlfriend is from Porto Alegre and I've traveled there now twice. I absolutely love the place and would like to move there permanently. I was wondering if any out there has any advice for someone like me. I am currently finishing my Masters of Accounting in Australia and was thinking of getting a job with a firm like KPMG. I currently hold a Bachelor of Science degree from a Uni in Canada(my home country). I would like to know how easy is it to find a job in Porto Alegre, possibly with an accounting firm or maybe transferring offices with KPMG (if that is possible)or even with a multinational organization. I can speak English, French and German and am in the process of learning Portuguese. Any information regarding this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Christian

Sorry, but I think that until you're fluent in Portuguese you shouldn't even try. Study hard!

Good luck, anyway...

I say go fot it - the moving part. Porto Alegre is great.

As for working for a firm such as KPMG, there is little chance they will hire someone who is not fluent in the home country language. Firms like that wouldn't hire someone in Canada, the US or Aussie that don't speak the language of the land, no matter how many other languages they speak. I say this from experience - I used to hire for Ernst&Young in the US.

Thank you for all this advice. I am in the process of learning Portuguese and hope to be almost fluent when I decide to move there (in about 1.5 years). Does anyone happen to have a contact email with an accountant in Porto Alegre, I've been searching the web to find one but they just aren't any there.
Cheers,
Christian

Hi !

As for the accountants address you asked for, the "Conselho Regional de contabilidade do RS" is a good place to start. They´re those who oversee the profession of accountant in the state. There you will find links to the names of all registered professionals in the state as well as a bunch of other relevant information. Homepage at http://www.crcrs.org.br/ and main email is crcrs@crcrs.org.br - Sorry, the page is available in portuguese only. Hope that heps get you started.

Marcos

I disagree with the poster who saidyou have to learn portuguese first. I moved to Rio Grande do Sul a few years back and spoke almost no Portuguese - just "yes", "no", "please", "thankyou", "beer" :-) It's the best way to learn, so I recommend you go ahead and move here. You'll pick up the language much faster here than back home, because almost noone speaks English or French, although you'll find lots of German speakers, even though it's a strange dialect (platt-deutsche I think mostly).

After 6 months of total immersion you'll be speaking fluently if you make an effort to study. Think of it as a long holiday. By then you should have found your way around the city, learnt the customs and the language, have a few friends etc then you can start thinking about working.

You might find some companies that will hire you with very basic portugues or none at all - international companies often have non-local languages as standard (e.g. I worked in Germany and Switzerland for different companies where the official internal business language was English.) Local companies have great need for multilingual people for export operations, but Accounting? Well, I have a friend who works doing audits for PWC global and he barely speaks a word of portugues or spanish but travels over the whole of south america with a team of locals doing the audits. Why? Because local staff to help in the translations are very cheap but good qualified (qualified in the 1st world) staff are hard to come by.

Good luck with everything. Feel free to mail me with any questions.