GTI Full Update | The Main Reasons for Frequent Refusals — DIY Applicants’ Habitual Misunderstandings! How Important Are Employment and Meeting the Income Benchmark?

But as the number of applicants keeps growing, the Department of Home Affairs has an ever wider pool to choose from, so the days of “invited in 1 week, PR in 2 months” are behind us,GTI processing requirements have clearly become much stricter and processing times have noticeably slowed. Ordinary highly-qualified students are no longer GTI’s darlings, so getting an easy invitation these days is no simple matter.

Looking at the major newly added sectors (such as education, healthcare, financial services, infrastructure and tourism, etc.),it isn’t hard to see that, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic throughout last year, Australia’s borders remained closed for a prolonged period — a multi-dimensional blow to a country that had long relied on migration to sustain its growth.So the Australian Government is keen to use the advantages of the GTI visa to attract more top talent across these sectors, to help drive Australia’s future economic recovery.

By the same logic, as the post-pandemic period unfolds, further adjustments to suit real-time needs cannot be ruled out.

This is a question that current PhD candidates or recent PhD graduates frequently ask.

GTI’s work requirement is that the applicant needs an existing job, or at least ajob offer, with an annual salary reaching AUD153,600 a year — in reality, most recent graduates can’t reach such a high salary, and some haven’t even found a job yet.

Many offshore applicants have quite extensive work experience,but based on local salary levels, their pay still doesn’t reach as high as AUD153,600.

In these situations, my advice is still:it’s more realistic to lodge your application once you have an actual job with a salary of at least AUD80,000-90,000.

A common mistake I’ve recently seen among students who DIY’d their application and were refused is underestimating GTI’s assessment standards,many assume that being a recent PhD graduate alone is enough.While the requirements do allow you to lodge an application,I want students to be clear on one concept:being eligible to lodge doesn’t mean lodging will get you invited —these are two different things.

To use an example everyone’s familiar with — the Subclass 189 Skilled Independent visa —, meeting 65 points on your EOI means you can lodge it, but to actually have a chance of being invited you may need another 20-30 points on top.

So, if you’d like a comprehensive assessment based on your own field, qualifications, academic achievements, referees, income and so on, feel free to contact me directly.

The following is a comprehensive analysis based on data published by the Department of Home Affairs and our recent successful invitation cases.

At the same time in 2020, GTI once set a record of being invited just 2 weeks after lodging an EOI, and receiving PR within two months — in the middle of the pandemic, a turbulent era for migration,and because of this, the GTI programme became extremely popular.However,after August 2020, GTI application processing began to slow down. A large batch of applicants’ cases were delayed for a long time with no news, and some applicants gradually started receiving refusal letters.

By this year, GTI processing had slowed even further — on average, an application, even a refusal, takes around 6-7 months before you hear anything. But if you’re an exceptionally strong applicant, you might still receive an invitation in as little as 2-3 months.GTI invitations work differently from skilled migration — it’s a merit-based invitation system, where every application goes into one large candidate pool, and case officers select the strongest candidates to invite.

So the logic is simple: picking the best out of 5,000 candidates will always take a lot longer than picking the best out of 500.

Recently, I’ve been receiving a lot of enquiries from applicants who DIY’d their application and were refused.Many current or recently graduated PhD students initially assumed this was their own “exclusive” pathway, and felt confident simply because they had qualifications and referees. As I mentioned above, there are now no shortage of applicants who are strong across the board.

After looking into their situations, I found the main reasons for refusal fall into the following categories:

• Applications lodged before this year’s reforms,with a Bachelor Honours or master’s degree— for these students, if they still haven’t been invited after the reforms, the Department will apply the new post-reform GTI requirements — under which only applicants who are about to graduate or have already graduated with a PhD are eligible to apply, unless they have very strong competitiveness in salary/income and academic achievement.

  
  

• Working in a field that doesn’t fall within GTI’s 10 target sectors;

• No job, or a very low salary. This kind of case is very easily refused.Because the number of GTI applicants is now so high, if an applicant doesn’t have a good job and a high salary, their chances of being invited are extremely slim.

Finally, when it comes to GTI applications, I don’t recommend applicants DIY it. GTI really isn’t a simple visa, and the Department has been placing increasing weight on how it assesses this visa type.