Where Are My Skills Needed
Some of us can have highly specialized skills, a dredging engineer or an anthropology professor, for example, and would therefore need to think critically about where to move. If you wish to pursue your specialized career, chances are that you have already entered some form of negotiation with your potential employer before moving, rather than showing up at the closest tech firm for dredging or a university with an anthropology department, because if they do not hire you then you have a problem. So for those niche jobs, do your research well and know where your potential employers are located in the country, then make contact with their HR department and ask if they have vacancies for someone of your qualifications. The best approach here is to just call them and have a talk, because sending an email for a nonexistent vacancy will almost certainly be ignored. Who knows, maybe you are the person they are looking for, for the position they have been planning to introduce, or they know of a sister company seeking someone with your credentials—niche jobs are often a very limited market, which means everyone knows each other.
In a nutshell, there are no fixed locations for such jobs. All the universities are in the larger cities. As for all other firms seeking specialists, they can be located anywhere. Here the job will naturally determine where you settle down, as most employers do not want employees who have to travel far to get to the job. Typically, in the Netherlands, the preference is no more than an hour of travel to your job. That is not to say that some people will not travel an hour and a half or more to get there, but employers only reimburse so much of the costs, and they expect you to be at work on time.
The Big Cities
Fortunately, most employment jobs are more standardized and therefore, most people chance moving to a big city, where the odds are that they will eventually land a job in their field or a closely related one. The common wisdom is that when that does not happen, you can swallow your pride and find temporary employment in another field to help pay the rent.
In the Netherlands, most work and most expat communities are centralized in the Randstad—this is an area that covers 3 of the 12 provinces that make up the Netherlands, namely: Noord Holland, Zuid Holland and Utrecht; and they include the 4 biggest cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht. This is the bustling hub of activity in the Netherlands, with the majority of expats living in or around these cities. Although competition for work can be fierce with many qualified candidates around, there is also much work available.
The big cities can sometimes be overwhelming with activities, noise, traffic, and so on; however, in the Netherlands, this is not as bad as in other European countries (with perhaps the exception of Amsterdam, mainly due to the narrow streets and multitude of canals). Also, in all the cities, as soon as you exit the central zone (always around the central train station), the bustle reduces proportionally to the distance you move away form this zone. So there are often more than enough neighborhoods that are calmer or greener, for those who prefer more serene surroundings.
The Opportunities
Of course, some cities have certain cultures and job opportunities. It would make sense to match your skills to the city that will offer you the most chance of employment. In Amsterdam, museums, tourists, financial headquarters are all present in force, so if you work as a curator, in hospitality, or are a financial analyst, then this might be an adequate city to move to and seek work.
The atmosphere is also important. For example, Amsterdam has a big hipster community, along with the shops and restaurants that cater for them. If you think of yourself as a hipster, you might like to live there, as this is more important to you than the type of job you can have.
So there you have it. Either your job decides your location, if you are a highly skilled worker in a niche market, or you head to a big city where you will likely find a job and some form of accommodation and atmosphere to your liking, and where you will probably meet like-minded expats.
Samir Rawas Sarayji