Hello all,

Does anyone here have a practical advice on professional relocation from Russia to Europe? The reasons behind making such a decision are far beyond the subject, perhaps, so I'll stick to the practical part.

Having done some of the "common stuff" for finding a job, I am now facing two serious problems:

1. I am a "dual-class" person, with university degree in marketing, and multiple years of self-studied computer competence (hence my writing here). Have professional experience in both areas.
2. I don't currently hold a European work permit.

From what I can see, this results in normal HR person throwing out my CV as either being "overqualified" or "too much trouble with making the permit".

I do have the skills and character to start my own business, but it requires start-up capital that I don't have, over the last years I had to pay high bills for medical treatment of my family member, who had deceased. Now, I'm almost out of debts.

As you can probably guess, English is not a problem, and I'm open to new languages, but first steps of entering the market, or the society, is the problematic part.

I live close to Norway, and am trying to get some professional contacts there, but it hasn't got me any practical perspective so far.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

EDIT:

I am currently making my living off web site development, and occasional consulting services both in IT and marketing. For purely geographic reasons I'm dealing with clients that reside in the same city where I live, pop. 350 000.

Being quite local, market requirements for web sites are simple and stable — clients need to control navigation, write articles in a word-like editor, upload illustrations and place ad banners, all with no additional programming. As many web developers do, I'm using my own content management system that fits these expectations.

I have also started developing a newer version of this system that has better support for international environments, but I'm too distant from the real market demand in Europe to speak of the right track here.

Technically it's based on php/mysql and uses xslt for templating. It allows for quick website deployment, and has architectural neatness, lack of which made me abandon similar opensource solutions (Joomla and the like). Deploying time from rasterized design proofs is normally under 6-8 working hours, don't know how that compares to the world practice.

EDIT 2:

Can anyone share what Norwegian (Scandinavian) web solutions market currently demands?