International Dental Hygiene preparation program

Greetings fellow DHs!                                                               July 12, 2009

We are writing to give you jobseekers an update on our progress. As was mentioned in the previous newsletter, we have been working on a new strategy aimed at helping you to effectively and successfully obtain overseas employment. We decided to do this based on the redundancy of issues and questions that continue to arise from dental hygienists seeking work through our company. There are still many opportunities for overseas employment but there is a lot more competition with the recent expansion of the EU. As a company, we have access to many of these advertised positions but more is needed than simply forwarding your credentials to help you secure your longed for international dental hygiene position. Therefore, our new format is designed to ‘coach’ prospective job seekers, individually, through the application and interview process. In addition to other improvements, we have designed and written a handbook, a guide for seeking overseas employment, starting with Switzerland. The material is based on research, current trends and actual experiences. This guide will touch on a wide range of subjects to help prepare you mentally for what you may encounter while seeking work abroad and for what you may encounter as you slowly adjust to your new surroundings. The chapters are designed to address many of the frequently asked questions and scenarios that jobseekers new to the overseas experience may have and issues that newly hired hygienists in overseas offices encounter. This first guide is based solely on the Switzerland experience but many of the principles contained therein can be applied to other European countries that employ North American hygienists.

As we also mentioned in our previous newsletter, our goal is to help you become an independent seeker of international dental hygiene employment. This means that we will help ‘coach’ and prepare you initially for your job search but afterward you should be able to independently and effectively advertise yourself to almost any international dental audience. Our ‘coaching’ and preparing will include:

• Help with CV and letter of introduction development along with the translation of these documents into the indicated language.
• Teaching proper overseas job-seeking etiquette.
• Preparation for the interview
• A copy of the guidebook which provides an overview of the Swiss culture as it relates to dental hygiene, the history of Dental Hygiene in Switzerland, and what you should know before accepting employment – including but not limited to the contract, salary, insurance and mandatory deductions, relocating and settling down, responsibilities and expectations.

Once you have completed the ‘coaching’ process, we will provide you with names and addresses of dentists seeking hygienists in the part of Switzerland that you might be interested in. If there are none in your chosen area, we will provide you with the names of those dentists in the nearby area(s) or you may choose a different area. This is an improvement from the previous method we used because you will now be in control of your own job search. You will be responsible for making the initial contact and for the subsequent follow-up correspondences. Thereafter, no matter how you come upon an open dental hygiene position abroad, you will already have some knowledge of how to proceed with properly advertising yourself and competitively applying for the position.

For those of you who have used our old method for applying for work overseas and who have already submitted your credentials to us, please contact us for information on how to proceed under this new format. Those of you who may be EU citizens or who may already be familiar with a European job search, please also contact us to see how you can specifically benefit under our new format. Unlike our old format, it is no longer our goal to simply forward your credentials to dentists without being sure that our candidates can effectively compete for an open position. This new format is, therefore, designed to better equip you with what you need in order to successfully compete with hygienists from other countries and obtain the overseas position that you have worked so hard to get.

Please note: The aforementioned guide is being edited at present and will be available for print and distribution this August 2009.

The team @ Dentallynx International