Nerine

Hub's prospective employer is leaning towards using the Sponsorship for Temporary Business (Long Stay) Visa (Subclass 457) over the ENS scheme. One reason for this is that they consider the temp visa to be quicker than the ENS which can take up to 8 months to come through.

However they also say that there could be a problem with doing an ENS as they aren't able to demonstrate a stable employment tenure.

I think this is because they are more geared up to nominating people for PR after they've been with the firm for 6 months, I don't think they've brought anyone into the country under ENS before.

Surely people have been granted ENS without having to have worked with the employer beforehand? I thought that was quite common place.

JAJ

Yes, of course this is possible.

Alana and Arrons mum

I have just been granted my ENS and havent worked for the employer.
Once I had sudmitted my visa(after my skills assessment) my visa took 21 days to be approved.
Andy

Nerine

Gosh that was pretty quick, good and congratulations!

How long did it take for your employer to do their side of things and did you submit your application simultaneously or wait until they'd had approval?

Alana and Arrons mum

My employer submitted their application which took about 3 weeks.I then needed to register with the QLD nursing board and get a skills assessment.The registration was pretty quick(about 6 weeks I think).It was the skills assessment that held me up.It took about 3 months.At the same time we arranged the police checks(about a month).
I then submitted my application and had my medicals in the same week.It took 21 days from then!I didnt realise it would be so quick.I am assuming it is because I already had a case officer from my employers application.
The whole process took about 6 months but, we didnt do anything for the whole month of Dec as we moved house and then it was Christmas,so I guess it could have been even quicker.
Hope this helps
Andy

Nerine

Hi again,

thanks Andy, that ties in with what the immigration officer is telling us - 6 months on average for ENS, he's also saying about 8 weeks for a temp visa.

The current proposal is to twin track and apply for both of them at the same time, get over there on a temp visa and be working whilst the ENS is being processed.

My biggest concern with is that the citizenship requirements are changing in a few months, even if we're over there by the end of June we won't get PR for a few months after that. By that time we'll have missed the 2 year cutoff and will be looking at 4 years for citizenship. Am I reading that correctly? I think I need to go back and have another look at it.

chrispy

Hi Nerine,
We are going on a ENS 121 (offshore) visa. To speed things up we submitted our forms with PCC and Meds frontloaded just after the employer submitted theirs, we then goy a case officer assigned three weeks later and have just had an email from the employer (who have spoken to the case officer) today saying that thee will be looking at it shortly so it might weeks rather than months. We started this at the biginning of January so we are hoping to have it sorted soon. Some people on this site who have gone the ENS 121 route have had very fast turnaround times for the visas (a couple of weeks).

With regards to working there while applying for the ENS visa, i do not think you can have two nominations in at the same time, i don't even think you can have a tourist visa while you are aplying for a working visa...

Good luck