Highlights
- Skilled migrants should find out if they need to obtain a relevant occupation-specific licensing or registration to work in Australia.
- Job applicants must use the right terminology used in Australia on their resume or CV.
- New migrants may need to take a step back initially and then work their way up while they get used to local systems, industry standards and work culture.
Mazin, a 41-year-old refugee, arrived in Australia with his wife and two daughters, three years ago. He was an electrical engineer in Duhok, in northern Iraq. But when ISIS occupied the area, he fled to Lebanon with his family. Three years since arriving in Australia, Mazin is still looking for a job in his field.
“I’ve worked as an electrical engineer for nine years in Duhok city and I’m trying to look and find a job, but unfortunately, I have applied many times to work in many places on websites like Seek and Indeed but unfortunately I didn’t get a chance, " Mazin explained.
Mazin says a lack of local work experience and language difficulties were the biggest hurdles for him and his wife, who has also been looking for work as a school teacher.
“They always ask that the applicant has local experience and for us, our experience is from other countries. Another reason why we are unemployed is that our language must be at the highest level. This is also a big barrier," he added.
According to a March 2021 report by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, one in four permanent skilled migrants in the country are over-qualified for their current jobs.
The report found that this mismatch between skills and jobs cost migrant workers at least $1.25 billion in foregone wages between 2013 and 2018.
David Forbes is a Senior Employment Operations Coordinator at Settlement Services International, an organisation that helps refugee and migrant communities settle in Australia.
He says it’s crucial for newly arrived skilled migrants to know what the pathway to employment looks like in their case.
“I think a lot of people have the misconception that getting employment is as simple as getting the education or getting the qualifications and the job actually comes and it’s just not the case, not for skilled migrants and not for Australians either and the problem with skilled migrants is that they have no idea about what these pathways to employment are — and when you get to skilled jobs which are a lot more particular, a lot more niche; the recruitment processes around them are a lot longer, more difficult and there are a lot of chances for them to stumble up in the process, so I think that understanding that pathway is really crucial and that can add the certainty to say ‘Okay here is how I can reach my employment goals," according to Forbes.
“We’ve found actually that even though the way they work here is slightly different because they’ve got the overseas experience, they have new ways of solving crucial problems. And we found that civil companies think that these guys are actually fantastic. They are really happy about the way they are performing because they are so happy to be there that they are just model employees. From there, they were opening up and said, ‘okay, that was the engineers — what else do you have?” David Forbes explained.
