NZ Update – NZQA

This post was created on the 26.11.2017. Mind you, things might change in future 😉

If you’re planning to get into NZ in the Skilled Migrant Category you’ll first have to create an Expression of Interest (EOI) and get an invitation to apply for the actual visa. Now getting past that EOI is not trivial (another post on that). One thing you’ll probably have get done is getting your qualifications evaluated by the New Zealand Qualification Authority (NZQA) via the International Qualification Assessment (IQA). Those guys basically determine what level your qualification (e.g. Bachelor of Science) is within the New Zealand Qualification Framework and how many points you get for that (You’ll need a certain amount of points to get past the EOI).

So… We just submitted our IQA. All via online form and email. It costs about 430€ per person, each person being allowed to submit multiple qualifications. So that was 860€ for the two of us… The equivalent of 280 Döners… That hurt. But getting the required documents hurt too.

Getting the required documents

We needed the follow documents:

• Bachelor of Science Certificate (Zeugnis) and Transcript. Both as originals in English.
• Master of Science Certificate (Zeugnis) and Transcript. Both as originals in English.
• International Marriage Certificate because of a name change. We got ours from the Standesamt in Germany. There was even an online way to apply for it. Somewhat unusual for paper loving german bureaucrats)
• Certified copy of passport’s identity page. Got that done at a notary.
• In addition we had to submit a skill shortage list form. We were told its very important NZQA validated the Long Term Skill Shortage we were applying under or otherwise we would not get the extra points on the EOI.

Getting the english versions of our documents required some effort and time. Don’t do it like we did. Get that done as soon as possible!

Now we have to wait 1.5 months for NZQA to process our IQA and should then be able to submit that EOI if all does well. We’ll see about that in 1.5 months.

Toodles!

image by Baim Hanif