New Skilled Occupations List

The Australian government created a new skilled occupations list (SOL) that will come into effect on 1 July 2010. Luckily for me I am still on the list. They reduced the occupations from something like 400 to just 181, or something in that line. So basically a more than 50% reduction in occupations.

I am only concerned with the IT related occupations. On the old SOL the following occupations were catered for:

• Computing Professionals (Catch all)
• Applications and Analyst Programmer
• Computer Systems Auditor
• Software Designer
• Systems Manager
• Systems Programmer

The new list only lists the following IT related occupations:

• Systems Analyst
• Analyst Programmer
• Developer Programmer
• Software Engineer

So they basically removed the Computing Professionals option. Many IT occupations came through on that catch all description, anything from a database administrator to a network administrator could be seen as a Computing Professional. It would seem the Australian government plugged that hole now. Basically if you want to go to Australia as an IT specialist your occupation must be closely related to actual programming or building of systems from scratch it seems.

Australia

I haven't blogged in a long while. I had some nice Trinchado at different places the last few months but I will blog about that later.

My family and I decided that it will not be suitable for our little girl of 14 months to grow up in South Africa anymore. A few weeks ago a small baby of 12 months was assaulted by criminals and she is still in I.C.U., so we decided that if the criminals do not even spare a baby, then we need to leave.

I started the whole process but it will take some time. Currently we are trying to get a state sponsorship from Victoria in Australia. We want to settle in Melbourne. We have a few reasons for this but just the fact that 1/3 of all IT people are employed in Melbourne makes the choice easier.

So I guess I will be blogging about the whole Visa application for the time being instead of nice food.