Moving to Australia 2

When we decided to take the step of moving to Australia, we went to see Philip at nTrust at the end of 2004. He was very helpful and he helped to check whether we were 'qualified' to apply for a PR Visa. Apparently there are different categories and depending on individuals qualifications, they can apply for different types of Visa. It is based on a point system whereby age, qualification, jobs are all taken into account. My advise is to visit a migration agent to see if you qualify if you are interested in going through the migration process, but make sure that the initial consultation is free. Furthermore the Immigration Department is always changing the regulations and it is hard to keep up with all the changes.

After going through our details, Philip advised us to submit the application through my wife as she is younger. Luckily for us, we are teachers and teachers do get higher points. Apparently there is a shortage of qualified teachers (check with individual states if you are interested in becoming a teacher, I'll talk about what I went through in a later post). Spouses automatically get the PR too so I had to just tag along.

For the application, PC had to submit all her documents ranging from birth cert to academic transcripts. As she was applying for a Skilled Migrant Visa as a teacher, she also had to sit for IELTS to prove that her command of English is up to the Austalians' standards, lol. She had to score higher than the usual and the papers are long and tedious. She had to register and get the dates to do it it at RELC. My advice for teachers migrating here is to apply for teacher registration as soon as they get the IELTS and the PR is approved, as IELTS is valid for only a year and they need that to be registered as a teacher here. If you make the same mistake as us, you haveto resit for the paper again and it is a toture. There's actually another qualification besides IELTs which is easier and they do accept for teacher registration but not for all states.

One thing good about going through a migration agent is that you do not have to go around looking to get the documents certified. The agent will do it for you. Certification must be recognised by the Australian government and apparently our JP is not recognised.

After getting all our documents done, which was very smooth, especially with Philip's help. We lodged the application sometime in early June of 2005 and surpisingly we got our approval in Nov 2005. The PR Visa is valid for 5 years from the date of approval and we were actually not ready to move over that soon as we still had other commitments. We only finally moved over in 2008 as one of the requirements is that you must stay at least 2 out of 5 years of the PR if you wish to get the PR renewed and we did not want to waste the opportunity.