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Immigration Daily News ACS and partial months not accepted for skills assessmentsAustralian Immigration Daily News
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ACS and partial months not accepted for skills assessments
I received an email today about Australian Computer Society Skills Assessments and I wanted to share it, as follows:
Hi Liana
There's another issue that wasn't covered - it's not just about skill assessing authorities using a different basis for skill level, ACS also have decided they will ignore partial months. This impacts the many IT clients who do contract work and have many short periods of employment, and as a result their partial months at the start and end of each period are not considered. This can add up and make a difference when trying to meet the 3/5/8 years of experience to obtain points.
As an example 15/03/2013 to 15/05/2013 wouldn't be 2 months, it would be 1 month according to ACS. (The 1/2 month for March and May each would be discarded)
I do around 70 - 100 ACS skill assessments a year and while ACS have improved their communications significantly in the last few years (gone are the days where they refuse to communicate) there are still some remaining issues like this that need to be resolved.
I wrote to the ACS Migration Manager on behalf of the above migration agent and received the following response:
We report on the month and year only. DIAC case officers receive the same documents and they make the decision on awarding points.
Comments
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Friday, 13 January 2017Hi Liana & James,
This information is very helpful, and thank you for that.
I have a question related to this. I am a freelancer on Upwork.com and I work for many different clients. During the start of my freelance career, from Jan 2011 to Dec 2012 I didn't have any full-time projects. Instead I had dozens of short-term part-time projects, and I was mostly doing 4-6 different clients' work every week and collectively I was still working 50-60 hrs per week.
Based on the ACS guidelines, I find it very hard to prove this experience:
1. I don't have experience letter from any client as those were all short term projects and clients just got out of touch once their job was done
2. I don't many's contact info either as many prefer not to disclose their info in case of small assignments and short-term tasks
What I DO have is this:
1. I have complete transaction history for the full period from Jan 2011 to Dec 2012 because all of those clients had to pay me per hour and those transactions details are present in Upwork.com system
2. I also have weekly hours reports for this complete during, which will clearly indicate that I did actually work 40-60 hrs per week collectively for different clients in parallel, but again as I said above these hours were NOT for a specific client but many clients, for example, I worked 10 hrs for client A and 14 for client B, 20 for C and 15 for D...
Now what I want to find out is how to present this TRUE experience in a way that it really gets accepted. This is undoubtedly a full-time work for 2 years, and ACS should really have flexibility to assess this experience positively.
Should I write a self declaration or an affidavit? If yes, what exactly should I mention in it? What should be the format.... I am really not sure and I tried to find all the help I could on internet but there was no such info. You are my last hope
Please advise me what to do.
I can even send you all the documents that you need.
Thanks in advance,
Zuhaib
Immigration blog
ACS round up the days to the end of the month. This means the 15/3 to 15/5 would be changed to 31/03 to 31/05.
This means if you had many periods of employment, you could potentially get up to 1 month extra for each period. This also means the standard requirement for ACS of having 4 years (with a Bachelor in ICT) could be reduced to well below 4 years.
If you had 6 periods of employment and each employment finished on the 1st of each month, ACS would give you 6 extra months for this so you only need 3.5 years to meet a 4 year requirement.
If you had 6 periods and started on the 1st of each month, you would lose 6 months and need 4.5 months to be eligible to meet a 4 year requirement.
It's the reverse for start date as you lose time unless the start date is the end of the month. For the end date you don't lose time (and will gain time if the day is before the end of the month).