Work /
Studies In Poland, is it easy to survive on part-time jobs? [259]
The topic of the thread is 'Studies In Poland, is it easy to survive on part-time jobs?' and the Nepalese guy asked about working while he's a student. Yes, there are jobs, mostly in the major cities like Warsaw, available for young non Polish speaking individuals with no experience in a niche or in demand field. These lower skilled, entry level type jobs are increasingly being taken by Ukrainians though. Sit down at a café, restaurant or bar in downtown Wroclaw and chances are there's at least a few Ukranians working there and basically every other café/bar/etc around it. Studying PL with hardly any savings and expecting to find a job as such an individual is imo not a good decision. The reason why is it's going to be very difficult to survive financially and go to school. It could work if you're working like 30-40 hour weeks and spread our your classes. At best he could compete for some low wage restaurant, hotel, agriculture, handicraft, etc. jobs that tend to mostly go to Ukrainian migrants.
Rent alone in a major city starts at around 2,500 z's - a bit above the minimum wage of 2k zloty which is around the type of earnings an inexperienced young male without an education could expect unless he has some blue collar specialty like construction, plumbing, mechanic, etc. especially at a part time job.
Even at a theoretical 20-25-30 z's an hour (25-30 being basically double the min wage of 2k z's a month) and 25 hour weeks he'd make 2k - 3k z a month - just enough to cover the rent. Either the person would have to find an employer willing to pay him 30-40 z's an hour for an unskilled job to make ends meet (maybe he'd make that as a waiter with tips at a nice restaurant in the rynek where there's always tons of tourists - but those jobs more often than not require at least some knowledge of Polish not to mention past waiting experience), or he'd have to work over 40-50 hour weeks to make ends meet at a low wage like washing dishes which plenty of ukranians are happy to take for 15-20 z's an hour.
Of course this seems like a ton of money to people like the Nepali guy where minimum wages are like $70-$100 a month and making $500 a month is considered a lot of money. However, the cost of living in Poland, rent prices, etc. make it very very difficult for someone just to come in with no language skills, no other highly in demand skills like coding for example, to just get a part time job that will pay him 3k zloty a month so he can manage even a fairly Spartan existence and share rent with other individuals. Also, he's going to be competing with tons of newly arrived Ukrainians who tend to get preferential treatment in job hiring for like lower skill, more entry level jobs and will gladly work 10 hour days at 12.5-20 zloty an hour. In 2015 even there was a report of security guards being paid as little as something like 5-6 zloty an hour. Even at the current minimum wage which I believe is 12.5 or even say 15-20 zl its going to be nearly impossible to be able to afford a typical college student's life if you have no prior savings.
Now if the Nepali guy studied computer science and became a programmer or coder or whatever he could easily make 10k z's after graduating. But during college an unskilled part time individual can't expect much more than the minimum wage and even then he'll have to compete with many Ukrainians for such a job which will have a far better grasp of Polish.