Essential Skills to Resident Visa

[blaney1983]

Hi,

I am currently working in New Zealand as a Business Intelligence Consultant on a 3 year essential skills visa and my wife is working from a partnership visa. I have been working for 9 months and we are looking to get a resident visa to make our stay more permanent and get extra security. Are our options only the skilled migrant visa as this would give us residency or would it be worth applying for the work to residence visa (but would need to work for 2 years and then apply for residency)? We are both from the UK originally.

Cheers
Andy

[A.C. Slater]

There's no point in applying for the work-to-residence visa. All that does is guarantee you'll have to wait two years, whereas if you apply now under SMC, you're looking at 9-12 months worst case, and often times less, as you'll see here in the forums. For me, it was 4 months.