As a fellow Italian who's recently moved to London (from Milan) and managed to escape the 9am-6pm cycle, let me summarize my last few years with these tips: -

As a fellow Italian who's recently moved to London (from Milan) and managed to escape the 9am-6pm cycle, let me summarize my last few years with these tips: - Get into freelancing. It's gonna be hard, you won't get rich with it (at least in Italy) but it's much less stressful. - Find some nice remote work on oDesk/Elance/whatever, possibly long term. I found a great client USA-based which I've been working with for the last 18 months, and it's still going well. Try to do some consulting work for a local company a few days per week to have a comfortable income. I was being paid 7€/h as an employee, and 27€/h as a consultant afterwards, in the exact same company) - Make yourself necessary for the clients you're working with. - Move. London's a great idea, it's more expensive than Italy but not so much as one would think (compared to Milan for example). You however _need_ to be fluent in English, if you don't want to work as a waiter as many Italians here do. I hope this helps a bit. PM me if you wanna talk about it. EDIT: grammar