Australia Skilled Worker Immigration Program

Permanent skilled visas in Autralia can be broken down into two categories:

• employer-sponsored and
• Independent.

For an applicant without employer sponsorship, such will be mandated  to lodge an expression of interest with SkillSelect. Skill Select is an online system that ranks applicants based on information such as age, education and work experience.

Furthermore, applicants are required to nominate an occupation on the Skilled Occupation List and be assessed by a relevant assessing authority as possessing the skills required for that occupation. The SkillSelect system is used to invite highly-ranked applicants to apply for permanent skilled visas and allow state and territory governments to nominate a highly skilled person for a visa.

What’s more, Independent skilled visas require an applicant to pass a points test. Here’s how it works:

• For each visa class subject to a points test, the immigration minister sets a “pass mark”.
• The migration regulations specify the number of points that can awarded to an applicant across a range of factors. These factors include the applicant’s:
• Age
• English proficiency
• Employment experience
• Educational qualifications
• Community language qualifications
• skills of an accompanying partner (if any)

Where necessary, additional points are awarded to those who are invited to apply for a visa by a state or territory government agency. This means that, where for example, the pass mark for a Skilled Independent Subclass 189 visa is 60 points. A hypothetical person who is 27 years old, has “superior” English, and a bachelor degree would be able to obtain 65 points on these factors alone. By contrast, a person aged 42 with the other factors the same would only score 50 points. They would thus need to rely on other criteria to obtain a pass mark.

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