Quite a few people have asked me how our plans to emigrate are coming along. Well, it’s a very, very slow process and there isn’t a huge amount to tell you. We’re moving forward but there’s a lot of waiting between each stage. As each phase of paperwork gets submitted we’re preparing the paperwork for the next application so we can keep everything moving without any unnecessary delays. We should have more news around Christmas, so watch this space.
A sunny beach picture of Exmouth in Western Australia to warm you up on this cold morning.
To give you a more technical update (in case anyone else is thinking of migrating to Australia) here is a bit more detail about what we’ve been up to:
Our migration agents submitted a massive pack of paperwork to the Trade Recognition Authority (TRA) in October. This included all of Husband’s certificates, references and payslips spanning most of his career. The TRA will then check that he meets the minimum requirements to enter Australia under the ‘Electrical Engineering Technician’ occupation which is on the current skilled occupation list. The TRA have 60 working days to assess our application, which takes us to the first week of January. If the TRA were to decide this occupation doesn’t quite match his skills and experience, we’d need to resubmit our application under the occupation of ‘Aircraft Maintenance Engineer Avionics’, which is an occupation on the Consolidated Skilled Occupation List (known as CSOL). Our migration agent is confident we’ll get in under the electrical role, so it should all be OK but if we have to resubmit and go in on the aircraft role it means we’d be limited as to where we could move in the country (which is why we’ve chosen to pursue the other role first). If your occupation is on the CSOL you can only move to states that need you via the state sponsorship route, and for us this would be Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory. We would do that if we had to, but we’re keeping everything firmly crossed that it all goes through first time with the electrical occupation and then we can move anywhere in the country depending on where we find a job.
We’ve filled in a massive amount of paperwork ready for the next phase of the application, which is our Expression of Interest (EOI). Our agent will submit that for us when our skills assessment has been accepted, and from there we should get an invitation to actually apply for a visa. How long we have to wait, nobody knows but we should hopefully be invited to apply within weeks of the EOI being submitted.
Oh yeah, and Husband has to take an English test next month which we need in order to submit our EOI. He has to take it as he’s the visa applicant – he can’t nominate me to take it instead (which he thinks is most unfair!) Although English is our native language, we need the extra points the English test gives us (so it’s not something that everybody emigrating needs to take – check your points total first). He’s really nervous about it and has bought masses of test papers and books online to prepare himself. To be honest, I’m finding some of the punctuation in the tests a bit old fashioned and it catches me out too – and I’m a freelance writer! He needs to score fairly high to get the extra points we need, so keep everything crossed for him on 14th December. I’m sure he’ll do fine but he can always resit at a cost of £135 each time if he needs to. We can’t put our EOI in until he has scored at least 7s across all parts of the test, or ideally 8s (as the higher score would give us more points and put us higher in the pile of EOIs – meaning we’d be invited to apply for our visa sooner). No pressure then!
So we’re moving forward slowly for the moment, but after Christmas the pace should really start to pick up. In the meantime, we’ve rehomed our dog ready for moving (a very difficult decision, but it was right one for him and us) and we’ve been renovating our house ready to put it on the market next year. Although we haven’t actually got our visa yet, we’re confident everything will go smoothly because we meet all of the strict requirements. Having an agent has really taken the pressure off as we can be confident that all of the paperwork is as good as it can possibly be to avoid any delays.
Our next big thing is what to do with all of our stuff!!! Let the massive clear out begin!