Offshore Credit Card Application: Fill & Download for Free

No point reiterating Jason Li's answer to What is an Australian local experience, especially in IT? but do you really think that work is the same everywhere? It’s not like you are given a computer, a parachute, and tasked to design things in isolation. You have to work with people and understand what they want, as well as be aware of local concepts, regulations, standards of behaviour in the workplace, and the industry (like, that network cables are not made in Australia).Say, you are designing an application billing a customer’s credit card. If you have never used a credit card before, you’d stumble at a basic stage. A lame answer would be, “yes but the specs document must describe it all”. No it must not, no one in their right mind will put general knowledge into a specs document.(Not just a hypothetical, BTW: I saw offshore outsourcing companies making basic faux pas like treating a CVV like a password.)And I am not even touching the language skills, or things like putting relevant information into one’s resume (e.g. skills instead of photos and references to participation in a church choir - again, not a hypothetical). I can also tell you that anyone looking to hire is swamped with completely irrelevant nonsense from overseas from people who just spray their emails in all directions.Are there “generic” IT jobs not requiring local knowledge? Sure, but as such most of them have been long outsourced offshore.I am getting positively sick and tired of people screaming discrimination or, worse, drawing the race card where it is not relevant at all. I also had to go through the same filter, and at no point it seemed illogical or excessive.Do your homework. People from all over the world come to Australia to work and live, not all of them are Nordic Aryan super-geniuses.A tip. “Requirements” in a job ad are not always essentials. If there are not enough candidates, they will compromise. “Local experience” is, in most cases, one of these requirements they will compromise on. Cover letter is your friend, because it is a personal message on top of the generic CV. You have to convince them though that you are not clueless. Don’t write, “I have white skin, I swear by my mom’s health”, write, “My background includes experience nearly identical to this position. My relevant skills are X, Y, Z. I am very enthusiastic about working in this field again”.It is always hard at the first stages when you’re starting from scratch, but if you focus on figuring out how things work instead of being a victim, you’ll fare much better.

Be very careful about taking ANY money into the USA. You will have to declare the income AND you may even be required to register a US corporation to continue.Now, as a student, in USA on a student visa, things can get really scary.My unofficial suggestion: Set up an account “elsewhere”, perhaps in your home country, and then get a credit card on that account.A credit card can be used anywhere and, presto, now you can buy things and pay for yourself in USA. Not too big amounts and no repeated large cash withdrawals.(My daughters both studied “abroad” and had daddy’s credit card to assist with their living.)

Oh my, yes.I worked for a company (since bought out by a large corporation) that processed credit card application forms. This was late ‘99-early ‘00. To keep costs down, they would scan the applications in a high-speed scanner system, then send the images down to Mexico for transcription, then send those transcribed files back to us, and we would send it to our end client. If the person down in Mexico couldn’t identify the letter, they could flag it and when we received the batch, I would have to resolve the flags.So many times, the flagging was because the person didn’t understand English. This isn’t a knock on them, but rather an obvious flaw in the business decision to offshore this. Just hire people who are proficient in English.Anyway, because of this arrangement, I spent hours in the middle of the night looking at pictures and empty red fields, typing in letters, numbers, words that fit. It was also my job to make sure the servers stayed running and call the cavalry if they weren’t.Too often, after receiving and editing the batch, there was nothing left to do. Servers rarely fail in a noticeable way.I may or may not have gotten a fair amount of sleep on the job. And yes, my boss did catch me once and didn’t fire me.The job was entirely unnecessary with just a few adjustments in hiring practices and fairly inexpensive purchases.