First of all, if you want to succeed with skilled migration, there’s no getting around a skills assessment — it’s the entry ticket for a skilled migration application. Different engineering majors correspond to different occupations, all ending in “engineer”. There are simply too many types of engineer, so this article covers the occupations most students go into after graduating.

The table above covers most of the engineering occupations available today. All of these occupations are assessed through the Australian assessing authority Engineers Australia (EA)responsible for the assessment.Engineering occupation assessments take somewhat less time than for computer science.

If it’s an engineering bachelor’s or master’s degree earned in Australia, and it’s an EA fully accredited course —

after graduation, you can submit your application to EA using your Australian qualification.

If it’s not an EA fully accredited course from an Australian institution —

Some Australian universities’ courses are currently still under EA review — if you graduated from one of these courses, take note: it means the course you studied doesn’t yet count as accredited, and when submitting your skills-assessment application you’ll need to write a “CDR (Competency Demonstration Report)”.

If it’s an overseas engineering qualification —

you can check the Washington Accord, Sydney Accord and Dublin Accord websites to see whether your qualification is recognised. Note that recognised qualifications carry an accreditation date, and your graduation date must fall after that date for your qualification to count as recognised.

For example: if School A’s Program A was accredited under the Washington Accord starting in 2014, and you graduated from the same school and program in 2015, your qualification counts as recognised. If you graduated in 2013, it does not count as recognised.

Likewise, for a non-accredited course, you’ll need to write a “CDR” when submitting your skills-assessment application.

Writing a CDR is a tough nut to crack — you need to provide 3 career episode reports (or work reports), 1 summary statement and 1 continuing professional development statement!

Most applicants who want to receive their invitation as soon as possible after getting their skills assessment treat the PY as essential reading, after all, those 5 points are pretty valuable. The Professional Year is a training programme lasting just under a year. Its content covers job-seeking skills and boosts graduates’ employability. The whole Professional Year runs for 44 weeks, made up of 32 weeks of coursework and 12 weeks of an internship. Classes run one day a week and can be scheduled on weekdays or weekends. Whether it’s for migration points or for staying competitive in the job market down the track, the PY is highly sought after by graduates.

One thing to note is that the Professional Year is a 1-year professional training programme designed for recent graduates, and it requires the applicant’s Subclass 485 visa to have at least 1 year of validity remaining. We’ve come across plenty of students who, after getting their Subclass 485, initially chose not to enrol in the PY, kept falling short of the maximum points, and by the time they wanted the PY’s 5 points, their visa had less than a year left — meaning they were no longer eligible to enrol, wasting those precious 5 points for nothing.

So students absolutely need to see a professional adviser before graduating and work out a detailed migration plan based on their own circumstances.If you still want to have a go at 189/190, our advice is to enrol in the Professional Year as soon as possible after graduating.

If you’re not considering 189/190 at all and only want to go down the 491 route, the PY’s 5 points aren’t quite so critical.

Next, let’s look at what each state’s 190 and 491 pathways require for engineering occupations in the new financial year:

[NSW 190 — Favourable]

As we all know, NSW has the largest quota of any state, and of course also the fiercest competition among applicants.Taking recently invited engineers as an example, invitation scores have all been 90 points or above.The occupation list released by the NSW government for the new financial year has left our friends in Victoria looking on with envy.

Occupations like civil, electronic, electrical, mechanical engineering, industrial and product designers, and telecommunications — these popular engineering occupations are basically all on the 190 list. As long as you currently live in NSW and have been resident there for more than 3 months, you can apply for NSW 190. NSW 190 has no strict work-experience requirement for applicants.

[NSW 491 — Recommended as Plan B]

The 491 list also basically covers all the common engineering migration occupations.

As long as you want to apply for NSW 491, even if you’re currently living in another state, you can still submit an ROI first. Of course, if you want to boost your chances of being invited, we’d suggest you’re best off moving to NSW once things settle down.That said, this financial year NSW 491 has changed its invitation rules again, so it really depends on how invitations play out in practice. It’s worth trying as a backup option.

[ACT 190/491 — Stable Policy, Short Cycle]

The whole of Canberra is classed as a regional area, and it’s currently only open to applicants already within Australia. Canberra has its own Matrix scoring system and occupation list, and plenty of engineering occupations are on the ACT Critical Skills List.As long as you broadly meet the 65-point EOI requirement for ACT 190 and 491, the state government will issue invitations based on your Matrix score as well.

In the ACT Critical Skills List most recently updated in September 2021, the existing engineering occupations were retained, electronic and electrical engineering were added, and architects and landscape architects made a comeback too.

ACT state nomination also has a few basic requirements:

1. Skills assessment

2. 2. PTE 65 across all four components, or an equivalent level

3. 491 applicants need, before submitting their application, to have lived and worked in Canberra for 3 months, and 190 applicants need, before submitting their application, to have lived and worked in Canberra for 6 months. (Any job that meets 20 hours a week counts.)

The Matrix scoring criteria take into account, in Canberra, your length of residence, job role, length of employment, and length of study, as well as the applicant’s English level, education level, secondary applicant’s English level, occupation and job role, and can even take into account local investment, property and family ties.

Over the past year, Canberra has been very active and consistent in issuing invitations — every week, rain or shine, sometimes even twice a week.Taking last week’s latest invitation round as an example, on the Matrix score, civil engineering was invited under 491 at 65 points, while the invitation score for engineering under 190 was 85 points.

Overall, ACT state nomination has a short preparation cycle and the Matrix policy is quite stable. For engineering applicants, the higher your English score above 7, the closer your work matches the nominated occupation, and the longer your residence and employment, the higher your score will be — and the partner points boost is significant too.We’d suggest that if your English doesn’t reach an 8 across the board and you have a partner, ACT 190/491 is well worth considering.

[South Australia — Favours Local Graduates]

Open up South Australia’s occupation list and you’ll find every kind of engineering occupation on there without exception. You need to click into each one to check the specific requirements. Overall, though, the South Australian government still favours local graduates much more, so we’d recommend that if you’re planning to apply for SA state nomination, you’re better off studying in South Australia too.

Pull up the requirements for civil engineering at random, and compared with local graduates, the requirements for those coming from interstate are noticeably stricter.Taking civil engineering as an example:

Applicants who graduated interstate

For SA 190, if you’re in greater Adelaide you need 18 months of work in the nominated occupation; outside greater Adelaide, in regional SA, you need 12 months.

For a 491 application you need 6 months of work experience in the nominated occupation

SA graduates

For a 190 application you need 12 months of work experience in the nominated occupation in the greater Adelaide area. In regional SA you only need 6 months of work experience

For a 491 application you need 6 months of work experience in the nominated occupation

For engineering-related fields like advanced manufacturing and new energy, the way the state government explains its requirements shows there’s still quite a high bar to clear.

[Victoria — Fewer Opportunities Narrow Scope, High Difficulty]

Both Victoria 190 and 491 require an ROI to be submitted first, and the state government’s requirements for applicants are still relatively high; the pool of applicants who actually get invited is relatively small, and it only really applies to applicants already in Victoria and already employed.

In addition, the focus of Victoria’s ROI critical sectors remains on “health, medical and life sciences”, among others.

Plenty of people have completely lost confidence in 189, but we think sufficiently strong applicants already onshore still have a chance. But if you’re a recent graduate choosing which direction to put your effort into, we wouldn’t really recommend it. For now, let’s take a sufficiently strong applicant to mean a raw EOI score of 95 or above.

There are a couple of common ways to make up that 95-point EOI score — let’s look at two of them:

If you want a real shot at 189, your English result is the key.A 7 across the board and an 8 across the board are 10 points apart.If you’ve already got that score, all that’s left is to wait for good luck to come your way.If your English isn’t outstanding, your chances of being invited under 189 as an engineer are pretty slim.

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