Immigration Regulations For Employment in Bermuda
Bermuda's immigration regulations for employment are complicated and we won’t go into the all the details of the application process here. In any case it is the employer’s responsibility to deal with this. Major points to note are:
- All workers must have a work permit issued by the Department of Immigration. The employer will apply for the work permit after offering you a job. You will only be successful if the Department of Immigration consider you suitably qualified and experienced. In most cases your job will have already been unsuccessfully advertised to Bermudians in the local press.
- Suitably qualified Bermudians will always have precedence over non-Bermudians for any job. Although this initially sounds daunting, practically it is not always a problem. There are huge numbers of jobs where there is simply a massive shortage of suitably qualified Bermudians. There are equally large numbers of jobs which Bermudians simply do not want. The range of jobs falling into these categories is diverse and sometimes even surprising. Professions and industries employing large numbers of expatriates include: accountancy, banking, construction, hotel and hospitality, information technology, legal, government (nurses, doctors, teachers, police), insurance (actuaries, underwriters), retail (butchers, florists) and secretarial.
- Certain categories of employment are generally restricted to Bermudians (e.g. house painter, travel agent, taxi driver, photographer etc.). This should not really be a concern, because you shouldn’t see any vacancies advertised for foreign workers in these categories.