Mgee

Hi folks,

We have taken our first steps in the Skilled Migrant process by submitting the online NZQA assessment. Well, our Finnish Master's degrees came back as bacherlor's degrees, i.e. as level 7 qualifications.

I sort of understand the reason for this, as both hubby and I did a straight-to-Master's programme, i.e. 5+ years of study but the first thesis and degree is Master's. A majority of programs in the unis were like that at the time, and it was the polytechnics that offered the bachelor's degrees (3-4 years of study and more concise thesis/study). It would have been possible for us to do a Bachelor's after three or so years, but in practise only people who chose to drop out in the middle of the programme did that, and it was not favored at all. That was the way things were done in the Unis here in Finland in the 1990s, and the system changed to include a mandatory stop at Bachelor's only about 5 years ago. I know for a fact that our degrees are comparable to any UK, USA or any other system's Master's degrees, but I guess the NZQA was fooled by the differences between the systems and the fact that we have no official Bachelor's degrees. I am confident that if we had a full assessment done, it would clear things up when theyf see the transcripts, contents and timelines of our studies.

Now the questions: Do we need to accept NZQA online assessment the result for the EOI and use that, or can we just ignore it for the EOI and do the full assessment if and when we get the ITA? Or should we do the full assesment round first, before submitting the EOI? We need to have some old school certificates translated for the full assessment so that would delay things a lot if we needed to wait for the translations and the full assessment before being able to submit the EOI.

My hubby is the main applicant, and with his degree and work experience, the NZIS points indicator gives us 155 points -with the Master's degree (M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, specialising in electronics). Advice please: should the next step for us be the NZQA full assessment or the EOI?

thanks for any help,
Mgee
-confused

PS: we are Finns living in Finland, not in the UK, so anything UK -specific does not apply to us... I'm just a trespasser/hangaround here

Persephone

OK, I'll try and help but I didn't need to get my degree assessed by NZQA. If you have 155points then you will get selected at the next draw [anyone with over 140pts or with a job offer are automatically selected.

With no job offer you should expect to receive an ITA within 2-3months. Once it arrives you have 4m to return it to NZIS.

From what I can gather on here it does take some time [months] for NZQA to deal with assessing quals. Hoping someone who has been through the process will turn up and help out. It would obviously depend on how long NZQA are likely to take, you don't want to get to the point where your ITA is running out and you have no assessment.
As far as I know you can submit your EOI before getting NZQA assessment.
This probably hasn't helped much but it will have bumped it back up to the top so easier to see