‘Engineers Australia’s online portal will be temporarily made unavailable during 22- 25 March. During this time, you will not be able to log in to EA’s Portal to initiate, submit or continue any applications’
Engineers Australia’s website contains the following announcement:
We are now well and truly in the new year 2019. With a new year comes new challenges! In this edition you will find out about recent changes, new options for applicants from France and important information from the IT front.
IT MAINTENANCE
A major IT maintenance operation will be impacting our assessment applications systems around the end of March.
We are putting a number of procedures in place to mitigate the impact on you and your customers. However, you will inevitably notice a few differences in the way applications are handled. If at all possible, we would recommend that you postpone lodging an application until 1 April 2019, at which all maintenance operations will be finalised. However, we are aware that delaying is not always an acceptable option, and the Engineers Australia team is working hard to make this transition period as smooth as possible for you and your customers.
We apologise for the inconvenience. We appreciate your patience and assistance during this transition period and will do our best to make it as smooth as possible.
When will this happen?
Engineers Australia’s online portal will be temporarily made unavailable during 22- 25 March. During this time, you will not be able to log in to EA’s Portal to initiate, submit or continue any applications.
How will this impact me?
Any application unsubmitted (unpaid) before this date will be cancelled. If you wish to pursue the assessment, we recommend that you finish and submit these applications before 22 March. Otherwise you will need to lodge the application again once the services are restored. However, if a customer is not under strong time constraints we also recommend postponing new applications until after 25 March. This would minimise the impact on your applications.
During the transition period, you will lose visibility of your applications in progress. They are not lost, and the assessors are processing them, however, your tasklist will appear empty. We recommend that you keep a record of the applications in-progress for your agency just before 22 March for your reference.
Please action requests for additional information through the system before 22 March. If you need more time to provide the requested information, you can liaise with the case officer to continue your correspondence per email. In this exceptional circumstance (and this is probably the only time we will recommend this), it is better to send back an incomplete or empty task. Not doing so by 22 March will make it impossible for you and us to process the application further.
And then?
After the services are restored, you will be able to log in normally. You will also be able to start lodging new applications, which will be visible in your task list at any stage of their process as usual.
However, you will notice that your task lists will be missing all the applications in progress lodged before the cut over date. You will be able to see the completed applications.
The assessors will continue to process all applications lodged before 22 March, though you will not have any visibility of this. The assessors will communicate with you per email to ask for additional information when required. Once these applications are completed you will receive the outcome as usual, and you will be able to see the applications re-appear on the completed task list. You will then be able initiate any relevant secondary services for these applications as needed.
We will issue reminders closer to the date.
APPLICANTS WITH FRENCH QUALIFICATIONS
An agreement was signed recently between the French Commission des Titres d’Ingénieurs and Engineers Australia to facilitate mobility for holders of the French Diplôme D’Ingénieur qualification. Under this agreement, holders of a suitable qualification will be able to use the same pathway for assessment as the holders of a Washington accords qualification.
Do you have a candidate who would fit this profile? Send us a scanned copy of their degree and transcript to memberservices@engineersaustralia.org.au and we will advise whether they are eligible for this new option!
PROCESSING TIMES
The current waiting times for Migration Skills Assessments applications are:
- Australian Qualifications And Accords Qualifications Assessment: 7 weeks
- Australian Qualifications And Accords Qualifications Assessment with Fast Track: 15 working days
- Competency Demonstration Report: 12 weeks
- Competency Demonstration Report with Fast Track: 20 working days.
Disclaimer: the above is a mere extract of a court decision. The views there expressed might not reflect the views of the Department, the AAT or the courts. The law or policies might have changed between the writing and reading of this article. The author of this article and Migration Law Updates disclaim any liability for any action (or omission) on their part based on any information provided (or not provided) in this article and are under no obligation to keep the general public nor practitioners informed about the matters discussed in this article or any other matters, or any future changes to any of those matters. It is the responsibility of each practitioner to obtain access to primary sources of law and policy by themselves and to carry out their own research and come to their own conclusions on legislation, case law, policies and more. This article is not intended for the general public.
Sergio Zanotti Stagliorio is a Registered Migration Agent (MARN 1461003). He is the owner of Target Migration in Sydney. He can be reached at sergio@targetmigration.com.au