Working in France
The prospective employer must request a work permit from the authorities. A long-term visa must be issued before moving to France. If you skip this, you may not be able to obtain a residence permit once in France.
If you have a temporary resident permit that does not give you the right to work (visitors, students), you can apply for a change of status. This is usually easier than starting from scratch. Apply directly at your local prefecture (services des étrangers). The prefecture will forward your application to the DDTEFP, which will examine the regularity and conditions of your stay in France and your profile and employment situation in the sector you have qualifications for.
The temporary resident permits with the status ‘private or family purposes’ (vie privée et familiale) gives, in most cases, the right to work everywhere in France without limitations (there are some exceptions, such as for nationals of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco), while the status ‘visitor’ (visiteur) does not give the right to work and you have to make a separate application for a work permit.
If you are a student at an official university (and not a language school), you are eligible to work up to 19.5 hours per week on a student visa. Quite a few foreigners actually enroll in a university program (around 300 euros a year) just to get the right to work in France. Once they’re in and they have their official papers to work, they never actually go back to classes.
The downside of this is that it’s long been used and abused which means that a student visa is becoming a difficult thing to come by as the French government clamps down on the number of visas issued.
