Australian Permanent Residence Granted!

After 3 years of living here in Australia, and about a year of waiting after applying for the Permanent Residence, it was finally granted. Having a Permanent Residence is a huge relief as it grants a great deal of stability to us and we can start thinking of our next phase of our lives here in Australia.

Getting Here #

About 3.5 years back, not very happy with how things were going in Romania, I decided to start looking out for a new role. From my previous interactions with Shantanu, I knew The Trade Desk would be a good fit as the tech was interesting and the compensation structure was fairly similar to what Adobe had offered, especially with the stocks aspect (ESPP & RSU). I made a note to reach out to Shantanu the next day and went to sleep. I woke up only to see a message from Shantanu asking me if I’m looking for a change :) surely it was a sign.

One take home assignment and 4 panel interviews later, I found out I had cleared the interviews and conditional offer letter was provided (subject to visa issue). We started collecting documents for our Australian work visa and went on our two-week Transylvania trip. About a month later, our visa was issued - a 482 Temporary Skills Shortage valid for four years.

I took a break for a couple of months and then moved to Australia in July 2022.

Applying for PR #

For the next few months, life here went by. I thought of applying for the 189 Visa (Skilled independent visa) but looking at the trends of invites for IT, it seemed very bleak. The other way to get a PR was via the 186 (Employer Nomination Scheme) visa - this requires your employer to sponsor you. The 186 also required that you be on the 482 visa for at least three years with the same employer. This rule was changed, allowing for people on 482 to be eligible to apply for 186 after 2 years of any eligible employer on the 482. With this info, I reached out to my manager asking to back me up for sponsoring my 186 visa. My manager agreed to provide the business support and with that blessing, I reached out to our global immigration team to start the process for my 186 visa.

With the necessary approvals in place, my employer engaged the immigration co-counsel to start the process.

The Process #

I really love how well the requirements for different visas are documented by the Australian Department of Home Affairs. Having this made it really easy to get started with the paperwork. For the 186 visa, we started with getting the paperwork for a positive skills assessment (via ACS). This involved reaching out to our former employers as ACS expects the roles and responsibilities letter to be in a very specific format, having very specific verbiage. The skills assessment also required two different documents showing income from the employer, which was hard to get especially for my first job. Nevertheless with all the submitted documents, I was able to get a positive skill assessment.

The next big thing was language tests. I’ve never done tests well and was wary of this. A quick search comparing PTE and IELTS indicated that the PTE was not only simpler, had a faster turnaround period and was automatically graded - in my mind, this meant that if I would fail to get the required score I could retake it again without having to wait for too long 😄 Both Jo and I prepared for the tests fairly independently - she more so, I was looking for the format of the test so I could be prepared for how the test would be rather than the actual questions. A genius move Jo did was to tell me to put on some loud cafe white noise video while trying to do a mock test as this was more likely to be indicative of how the test center would be. Having done this calmed our nerves on our test day. A week had passed by and we got our test results - Jo got hers first - full marks 90/90. I was now worried how much I would get and I ended up getting the full score as well!

Next up was the Police Verification - thankfully, our immigration co-counsel told us that since we’d submitted them for our 482, they’d make use of the same documents and would not need a new set of documents to be issued - except the AFP ones - we had to get those done but they were pretty fast.

The final part that took the longest was the health screening. There’s only a handful of clinics that are authorized to do the health screening and the appointment we got was months away, so we just had to wait for the appointment date and submit it.

The wait #

Once all the documents were submitted, our immigration co-counsel told us that a decision could take anywhere between 12-18 months and we would not get any sort of real-time status update. I found the AusVisa subreddit and found it to be quite useful to keep an eye on trends and for general visibility on the ‘processing’ queue. Trends such as issuance slowing-stopping altogether during end of financial year/election time were also observed from posting trends on the AusVisa subreddit.

At the start of the month, I noticed an uptick in the number of people posting about their visa grants - and this got us hopeful if we would get ours soon. And thus last week, we got ours approved.

It’s nice to have permanent residence - till now my stay in Australia was tied to my work and now I don’t have to worry about that. For Jo, being a dependent on a worker visa pretty much meant that nobody wanted to hire her (many job applications flat out auto reject you if you mention you don’t have permanent residency) so it’s a nice change. Apart from this, the system treats people on work visas as temporary visitors - and that means things like loans/financing etc get a lot more difficult.

I’m glad we have this sorted, and now it’s time to figure out the next big thing - housing :D