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Trades Recognition Australia (TRA) has now released details of the Job Ready Program.

The Job Ready Program will affect international students completing trade qualifications (eg cookery, hairdressing) in Australia and who wish to apply for General Skilled Migration.

The Job Ready Program will be a 4-step process, and the total cost will be about $4,500. 

1. Provisional Skills Assessment
2. Job Ready Employment
3. Job Ready Workplace Assessment
4. Job Ready Final Assessment

Within this article we will cover the four step process in a little more detail and will try to summarise the effect of the change on your own visa application.

Step 1. Provisional Skills Assessment – Skilled Graduate Applicants

The provisional skills assessment will allow students to apply for a Skilled Graduate subclass 485 visa. For this part, you will need:

• An Australian trade qualification (Certificate III or higher)
• At least 6 months of relevant work experience (can be part-time)
• 6 or more in all 4 bands of IELTS, or passport from UK, US, Canada, Ireland or New Zealand

Step 2. Job Ready Employment

If you wish to apply for permanent residence, you will then need to undertake at least 12 months of full-time work experience. This employment will be highly regulated by TRA, and will require your employer to register with TRA and you will need to keep log books of your work. You will also need to do some additional training in Australian workplace skills during this time.

Step 3. Workplace Assessment

Once you have been employed in your trade for 6 months, you can undertake a workplace assessment. This will be a practical test in applying trade skills in the Australian workplace, but we are still waiting on exact details of what will be involved.

Step 4. Final Assessment

Once the first 3 stages are complete, you then apply electronically for the final skills assessment for the permanent visa.

Consequences for Skilled Visa Applications

The Job Ready Program is a significant change – I’ll try to summarise the effect of the change on visa applications:

•  If you have already applied for a permanent or temporary skilled visa, you are not affected by the change.
• If you have already obtained a TRA assessment before 1 January 2010, you will only be able to use this for a skilled graduate visa.
• If you have not applied for your permanent skilled visa yet, you will need to go through the job ready program to apply.
• From 1 January 2010, you will need a completed skills assessment to be able to apply for a permanent skilled visa. As the job ready program takes about a year and the skilled graduate visa is valid for 18 months, there is not a lot of time to spare if you wish to get your skills assessment completed in time.

Written by Mark Webster at  Acacia Immigration

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