Kimberly Cole joined the United States Air Force in 1999 after her freshman year in college to see the world and let Uncle Sam pay for her education. Little did she know at the time that she would land in England, marry an Englishman and earn three university diplomas.
Born and raised in the Denver, Colorado-area, 34-year-old Cole graduated from Golden High School and enrolled in a local college. After one year and a little research, she discovered that the air force would not only help her fulfill her dream of living abroad, but also subsidize her higher education.
Her first assignment was Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota where she worked in intelligence and enrolled in an online-degree program. After completing three years of online study, she switched to an evening job, which allowed her to complete her final year on campus at Minot State University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in general studies. She added an MBA over the next several years, again using an online degree program.
She began to get a taste for living in another country when the air force sent her to Guam, South Korea and England for temporary duty and then reassigned her full-time to Osan Air Base in South Korea. But it was her final assignment that brought Cole the expat life she had always dreamed about.
She was assigned to RAF Mildenhall Air Base in 2006, a 45-minute drive from Cambridge, to work in the area of life support for aircrews. She packed parachutes and ensured that survival equipment, life rafts and other emergency equipment would work when needed.
Shortly after arriving in England, she met her husband, 35-year-old Jon, in Cambridge during one of England’s infamous pub-crawls with her air force squadron colleagues.
“My husband is English and from Histon,” she told us. “We have been married for almost eight years and have a golden retriever named Dusty and a cat named Ruttles.”
The couple tied the knot in 2007 and Cole left the military in 2009 to look for a job in England.
“Even with an MBA, finding a job in the U.K. as an American is not that easy,” Cole said. “My only experience was in the military rigging parachutes and checking survival equipment, so there was not a lot of demand for my skill set outside of the air force. Plus, in the United Kingdom and European Union, the employer must make a case to the government that you are the most qualified person before you can get a job offer.”
Cole said that Americans need to know that job-hunting in the U.K. is a bit different than in the U.S. “Here, most people use recruitment agencies to find a job,” she said. “Employers pay them to find and vet potential job candidates. The best way to find recruitment agencies is to search online in the specific area you would like to work. There are both general agencies and specialized agencies that focus on specific industries or skill sets, like engineering.”
Her first job came through a recruitment agency recommended by her in-laws. “I was hired by the National Health Service (NHS) to work in a swine flu incident room, primarily because of my computer skills.”
That led to a series of other jobs, including working briefly at the U.S. Embassy in London (she did not enjoy the long commute by train). One of her more interesting jobs was managing a local fitness center for women called, “Sweaty Betty.”
But finally in 2011, Cole found her current job in Cambridge, which she enjoys very much. “I work at the University of Cambridge’s department of physics as a group administrator,” Cole said.
She works primarily with post-graduate students in the department budgeting for scientific grants, purchasing high value items, helping them advertise new jobs and generally managing the administrative function for the group.
Her husband graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in outdoor recreation and sports and has been a window washer for a local company since they married
“I’ve been living in England for almost nine years now and I absolutely love it here,” she said. “We have great access to the continent, it’s really easy to travel here and I love the history of the country, which motivated me to get an additional bachelor’s degree in history. I was doing historical research for my blog anyway, so, since it’s all paid for by the U.S. government, I enrolled in the online American Military University program and got a B.A. in modern European studies.”
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