How I Got a Work Visa in Spain by Changing My LinkedIn Location
I know how that sounds. But it's exactly what happened.
When I decided to move to Barcelona, I had no job lined up, no connections here, and no real plan beyond knowing I needed to be here. I'd visited during my junior year of college, spent a year in Sevilla, and never fully got Spain out of my system. Years later, when the reasons I'd been staying in Chicago were gone, I bought a student visa, quit my job, and got on a plane.
The student visa was the fastest way in at the time. It wasn't glamorous. I paid a small amount, enrolled in a program, and told myself I'd figure the rest out once I landed. What I didn't expect was that the rest would sort itself out within two weeks.
I changed my LinkedIn location to Barcelona. That was it. That was the move.
A company reached out almost immediately. They were expanding into the American market and needed someone who understood it from the inside, who had the relationships and the cultural fluency to open those doors. I'd spent years in Chicago selling radio spots door to door, cold calling, getting rejected daily, building the kind of thick skin that commission-only sales gives you whether you want it or not. Turns out that experience, which felt like a detour at the time, was exactly what they were looking for. They interviewed fifty candidates across Europe. They hired one.
Within weeks of arriving I had a work visa.
I'm not telling you this to make it sound easy. It wasn't, and the years that followed had their own complications, their own lawyers and bureaucratic headaches and moments where nothing made sense in a language that wasn't mine. But that first break came from one small, almost embarrassingly simple action. I told the world I was already where I wanted to be, before I'd fully figured out how to stay.
If you're thinking about making the move, change your location. Do it before you even pack. You never know who's looking.
Where to stay while you get settled in Barcelona:
Hotel Arts Barcelona — if you're arriving and want to land softly before finding a flat
Yurbban Trafalgar Hotel — boutique, central, great base for neighborhood exploring
Hotel Brummell — Poble Sec, local feel, good for getting a sense of real Barcelona
Ohla Barcelona — Gothic Quarter, walking distance to everything
Casa Camper Barcelona — design-forward, El Raval, quietly one of the best hotels in the city