Journey to the middle-earth - long read
First of all, I have to thank each and everyone for helping me out by answering all the silly questions that I have raised in this forum. I would like to share my journey to New Zealand. I am from India and was on employment pass in Singapore. I am a software developer focused primarily on Android app development.
Like everyone, I decided to make a move. My initial thought was to move to Australia because of the job opportunities. After consulting an agent for Australia immigration, I was flattered and decided to go through the PR processes. For a Software Engineer to get a PR, one ought to have 7 in each module in IELTS. Unfortunately, I was unable to score it and was totally depressed. The Australia immigration thought was totally collapsed. :-(
One day, I came to know about New Zealand Immigration through one of my friends. With a little hope, I decided to apply for New Zealand Residency. As we all know, the English language requirement for NZ is 6.5 in IELTS. I thought of applying it by myself without going to an immigration agent. I really have to thank this forum again. I have read quite a few threads about the process. Initially, It was really hard to understand PAR, IQA,EOI. I am not going to explain that. It is better to explore yourself if your are applying on your own. 😉
PAR & IQA
As most of my documents were ready, I was all set to apply PAR. People mentioned that PAR is waste of time & money and, asked me to apply for NZQA, IQA. Some how I didn’t listen to them and submitted my PAR for me and my wife. PAR was successful.
EOI Submission
I was filling the EOI form for almost a month. Right after my PAR submission, I was filling my EOI form. When I was about to submit, I heard from my friend that his EOI for NZ got rejected because of PAR. For the qualification from India, one must need the IQA if education is not listed. I realised that the forum answers were right and applied for IQA and waited for 1 month. Trust me, waiting time was really a pain. I had a spelling error on my birth certificate. To make things faster, I applied for BC from High commission of India, Singapore. Again, 10 more days added to my waiting time. Finally, I submitted my EOI.
As usual my EOI got selected from pool with 145 point without a job offer. One day, I received an email from the officer stating that my EOI was rejected as the dates I mentioned and the years of experience I selected were not tallying. I came to know that it was a human error. When I was selecting the year of work experience for one of my companies, I have selected a wrong input. This is a huge list of years you select from a combo box. I reapplied immediately and waited for the EOI to get selected.
Invitation to Apply
After almost 8-9 months of Immigration, I got my first good news. I received an invitation email to apply for residency. I can still remember the happiness me and my wife shared after a long time. We started gathering all the documents. In the invitation email it was clearly mentioned that I have to submit a birth certificate certified by municipal corporation at my home country and a certificate from High commission was not valid. This is not true for everyone though. I had all the documents for ITA submission except the birth certificate. My wife and I applied for a birth certificate from India. I applied from my home town and my wife from hers. My wife received her certificate in a month. It took me exactly 3 months to get a birth certificate. As other documents were ready, I managed to collate all the documents. Later I came to know that my passport had only 2 pages left. Since I didn’t have time to renew the passport, I just submitted all the certified copies of my original certificates.
Now the real wait begins...
Additional documents
The worst part is about waiting patiently. Me and My wife ran out of patience. We were roaming around like zombies. We were not able to plan for a trip / vacation. Finally, we decided to plan for Europe trip. Since I was left with only two pages in my passport, I renewed it. When you renew your passport, the passport number changes ( i didn’t know that). So again, I spent for courier to send my new passport copy with the notary signature. Within few days, I received an email from my CO requesting new documents. This time it was regarding my name change.
I would like to highlight this. For Indians, I believe, most of them have their name registered in the school with their initials. for e.g. Daniel Craig - ‘Craig' could be surname / father’s name. In my certificates, my name is mentioned with initials ( e.g. Daniel C ) ; my name is mentioned with first and last name in my passport. There were also some certificates with my name spelled wrongly (For e.g. .Danieel craig). My CO requested me to send a statutory declaration for the same within 3 days.
We managed to get that and sent them through courier. (courier charges 😔 ) . Waiting again..
Gathering of evidence & a surprising Job offerI used to compare the timelines of every single user with mine. Please don’t do that, this will surely increase your blood pressure.
This forum was/is my Facebook. I almost read everyday even now. While going through the posts, I got to know about the preparation for the interview questions. And, for few questions, the CO might ask about the job opportunities and the effort that we made for finding the job. So, I started gathering evidence by saving all the reply and the responses (mostly negative one 😔 ) for showing that to the CO.
One fine day, I got a call from a consultant about the opening. He was keen about the status of my VISA. I replied him that “ My process is almost complete and am waiting for my final immigration interview” . And, I also informed that I am ready to join the company within a months time after getting my VISA stamped. Since it was more than 4 months waiting, I told the agent approx timeline of 2 months. This was a wild guess. My intention is to show the job offer to the CO and ask them for the interview. The whole interview process was around 1.5 months. It was a really hard and tough interview. 😔
Finally, I got the positive call from my agent. It was like breeze. I sent the offer letter to my CO and asked her to process my application faster.
Immigration interview
I was expecting an email about employer call. But, the reply was about the immigration interview. My CO told that as most of the processing is done, the job offer cannot be considered for the processing and I still have to go through the immigration interview. They also asked me to send the offer letter and confirm the dates.
The interview was not that hard. It was the same questions that you find in this forum. We had some issues when hearing the interview questions. Initially we were scared about the accent but that wasn’t that tough.
Residence VISA
I was expecting the result within a month time. But, in 6 days, I received an email from the online portal. Guess what? the status says “APPROVED”. I was extremely happy and couldn’t control my smile at the office. I still was not convinced as I didn’t get AIP letter. I thought of revealing this to everyone only when I get my AIP letter.
The start of 2016 was brilliant. I received the AIP email exactly on 31st of December.
Now, I am waiting for my passport to get stamped. I have to join my new company at Wellington by February 2016.
Thank you all. Thanks a lot.
P.S: Attached Sample experience letter format for Software Engineer profession.
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