So, what have I been doing in the past 10 months?

I started working in IT again...

Before moving to Morocco, I used to run a PC shop for many years. I was an IT guy doing mainly IT hardware repairs and PC troubleshooting stuff. My domain at that time was the IT consumer market.

Ten months ago, I got hired as an IT support agent and shortly after, I became technical lead at the Service Desk of this large enterprise (5.000 managed workstations). This time I'm working in an enterprise environment and my mission is this: log and resolve incidents to help keeping the IT infrastructure running. I have been working hard and I'm preparing myself for the next project: IT support level 2, solving the more complex issues.

Many people would ask me how I did manage to find a job that easily since I'm not (yet) a fluent Arabic speaker. The answer to that: I'm using my native language since our client is a large Belgian utility company. They are saving a substantial amount of money by outsourcing a part of their IT operations offshore. I am so THANKFUL to the greedy Belgian government... thanks to their tax system which taxes away around 2/3rds of people's labour, I easily found a job in Rabat. Here, from 2.500 km's away, I help keeping the IT infrastructure running in the benefit of this Belgian utility company.

In my experience, an average wage is taxed away between 20~30% in Morocco and there are no unemployment benefits to pay for. I'm getting paid at the level of a construction engineer because IT skills combined with foreign languages (other than EN/FR) are very rare in Morocco, and not less important, the Moroccan IT service sector is showing double-digit annual growth.

The whole concept of outsourcing labour is exactly what I had in mind in 2012, I wanted to outsource my own labour. I did not want to continue being a productive EU citizen so I outsourced myself to the African continent :-)

More on the beautiful IT service outsourcing story in a next update...