Australia conducts its March Skill Select round in spite of COVID-19

Amid the Coronavirus pandemic Australia announced its third Skill Select round for 2020 that was conducted by the Australia’s Department of Home Affairs. The latest round saw a total of 2050 skilled visa invitations issued to immigration candidates. This was a significant increase from the 1,500 invitations issued in the last round held in February this year. The latest round has increased the hopes of prospective immigrants who hope that immigration programs of Australia will continue despite COVID-19.

Australia has set a target of 16652 invites this year. Out of these 4000 invitations will go to citizens of New Zealand. The invitations were issued under Subclass 189 (Skilled Independent) and Subclass 491 (Skilled Work Regional (Provisional) Visa.

The following number of Invitations were issued in the March round:

Invitation process and cut offs:

Applicants with the highest scores are invited to apply for the relevant visa. For applicants with equal scores, the order of invitation is determined by how early they reached their points score for that visa subclass.

The minimum points score for the Subclass 189 visa was 90 and it was 85 for the Subclass 491 visa.

The graph below shows the points for clients who received ITAs in this round.

Here is the breakdown of the minimum points score for the various professions that were given invitations in this round.

Immigration experts hope that the Department of Home Affairs will continue to issue 1000 skilled visas every month during the program year which has two more months to go.

The Skill Select round conducted in March is an indication that despite the Coronavirus pandemic, the Australian government is keen to continue its Skilled Migration program so that the country has the required workforce for its economic development in the future as well.

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