Mechanical Engineers looking to close around December 2016 with just 495 out of 1539 places left in their occupational ceiling.
Electronics Engineers looking to close around February 2017 with just 556 out of 1000 places left in their occupational ceiling.
DIBP will not have 150/200 places per round to fill their target for the family sponsored 489 visa over coming rounds (only 113 were eligible to be invited in the last round and there were no more in the system).
DIBP have a target of 43,990 visa grants in the 189 category for the 2016/17 program year. On the assumption that DIBP do not have a great backlog of cases in this category (as processing times are not long) it is reasonable to assume that they would like to issue a SIMILAR number of EOI invites this program year (43,990). If in fact they want to be close to this figure on invites then after 3 months of this program year they are way below target on only 10,050, they should be around 10,998.
Invites for the pro rata occupations are 5,415 of an estimated 13,483 for the whole year, if this was tracking to plan then there would have only been 3,370 invites so far.
There is going to be a point soon where DIBP are going to be thinking WHERE are we going to get our numbers to meet our 189 target of around 43,990 for the year. On the above figures they can’t rely on 489s as firstly they are not counted as 189s and secondly there are not enough eligible 489s to meet the current 200 or 150 per months of expected invitations. DIBP won’t have the luxury soon of inviting mechanical and electronic engineers as their numbers are about to be used up. And the Pro Rata occupations are already over subscribed and they won’t fill the gap if the current ceiling restrictions continue.
Last year DIBP were able to grant visas to a number of old priority 5 occupations, but there are not many of these available and so that is unlikely to assist much. And as mentioned previously the 189s do not have a great backlog and any old ones in the system are likely to be there because of processing complications or integrity/security checks.
DIBP like to come in on exactly the quota for the program year and in a choice between do they miss their 43,990 target because of not having enough eligible candidates or do they send out more Pro rata invites than they wanted to (that is go above the occupational ceilings), that will be a very interesting call for DIBP to make…
If DIBP do decide to relax the Pro Rata occupations (note nobody has said they will, we are merely crunching numbers and speculating here) then it may help some of the 65 points Accountants and Auditors who have waited a while.