About the founder
Arka Dev Sharma arrived in Australia in February 2022 to study, spent 14 months in survival jobs before landing his first corporate role, and built the system behind Ark Abroad from what actually got him out of it. This is that story, in full.
I arrived in Melbourne from Delhi in February 2022, on a student visa (subclass 500), to study a Bachelor's degree in Business Information Systems at Swinburne University of Technology.
Like most people reading this, I didn't come here expecting to spend over a year in survival jobs. My first one was as a food service attendant at the MCG and Marvel Stadium, working under Delaware North. On event days the queues never stopped, and the job meant lowering baskets of frozen fries straight into hot oil for hours on end. The oil splattered constantly. I still carry small scars from it.
After that I worked front desk at a Quest Apartment Hotel in Richmond, handling everything a busy inner-city hotel throws at you on a given night, including situations that had nothing to do with hospitality and everything to do with the neighbourhood.
That built up over months, not one bad day. I was, quite literally, one root canal away from real financial trouble.
The actual shift had nothing to do with a better resume. I started reaching out to people on LinkedIn directly instead of just applying, and treated the search like a system rather than a hope: structured outreach at volume, tracked and repeated, instead of one-off applications disappearing into a portal. That shift is the entire premise Ark Abroad is built on.
It worked. I landed my first corporate role in Australia, a Data Analyst position at ID4ME, one of the fastest-growing proptech companies in the country, in October 2024. I graduated the following month. I had the job lined up before I'd technically finished my degree.
For a while after that I did freelance data analytics work for other proptech startups, and in whatever time was left, I helped friends and family work through the exact same problem I'd just solved for myself. It worked for them too, consistently enough that it stopped feeling like a favour and started feeling like something worth building properly. Ark Abroad launched in August 2025, because I kept meeting genuinely qualified people, some of whom had spent significant money, sometimes their family's life savings, on an Australian education, still stuck in survival jobs with no idea why nothing was landing.
Bachelor's degree in Business Information Systems, completed in Melbourne in November 2024. Nothing else, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Three years of hands-on data analytics work: dashboarding, reporting, data governance, ETL, systems integrations, and prediction models. Billkut.com → ID4ME.
I've also sat on the other side of the hiring table. I've screened and hired for data and IT roles myself, which means I've read the resumes, run the process, and made the calls that decide who gets an interview and who doesn't.
Ark Abroad isn't a one-person operation, even though it started as one.
Runs most of the initial strategy calls.
Works out where someone's actually stuck.
Ark Abroad · ABN 27 938 486 472
Most people think applying to jobs and doing a few courses will eventually land them a role. They're putting in effort, just not in the right place, and a lot of the advice they're following comes from people who searched for jobs a decade ago, in a market that doesn't exist anymore, especially with how much AI has changed hiring since 2022.
I don't make false promises, and I don't pretend this is easy. It's genuinely hard and it's going to be uncomfortable at points. But what you build here compounds, a skill you'll carry for the rest of your career, well beyond whichever job it gets you first.
People who want quick results without doing the work. People who aren't willing to put in the effort. And, honestly, people who don't have the underlying skills yet, we help package and present what you've got, we can't manufacture skills that aren't there.
Talk it through with the team, honestly, before you decide anything.