Skilled Employment Points: Why Extra Years Stop Counting

Skilled employment is one factor in the points table, scored on two separate tables — one for work outside Australia, one for work inside it — that are then added together and hard capped. Eight years overseas and five years in Australia looks like 30 points on paper. It is 20 in practice. This page goes through exactly how the tables work, what counts as qualifying employment in the first place, and why the cap is the single most important number in this factor.

The short version

Parts 6D.3 and 6D.4 of Schedule 6D each set out a table: years of experience in one band, points on the other side. Part 6D.5 then adds the results of both tables together and caps the sum at 20. Nothing about the cap is hidden or unusual — it is simply the part of the points table people are most likely to do the arithmetic on incorrectly, because it is easy to add two tables and forget the ceiling sitting on top of them.

Two tables, not one

Overseas employment and Australian employment are scored separately, using different bands, before they are ever combined.

Notice the two tables don’t mirror each other. Overseas experience needs 3 years before it scores anything at all, while Australian experience starts scoring after 1 year — and the Australian table reaches its top band of 20 points at 8 years, while the overseas table tops out at 15 for the same 8 years. The tables are not treating the two kinds of experience as equivalent, and neither should you when planning around them.

The ten-year window

Both tables only count employment within the 10 years immediately before invitation — not before lodgement, and not across your whole career. A candidate with 15 years in their field only has the most recent 10 available to this factor; the other 5 exist on a CV but not on the points table. This is worth checking carefully if your career includes a long break, a career change, or years spent in a different occupation altogether, since those years may sit entirely outside the window regardless of how skilled they were.

What actually counts as skilled employment

Not every hour of paid work in your field qualifies. The regulations define skilled employment with a substantial-hours test in mind — broadly, the work needs to be at a level close to full-time, not sporadic or token part-time work, to be counted as skilled employment for these tables at all. Genuinely casual or low-hours part-time work is at real risk of not counting, or of being converted to a fraction of full-time-equivalent months rather than counted year for year.

“Nominated or closely related”

Both tables only count time in your nominated occupation or one closely related to it. In practice this is decided by your assessing authority, not by you: they compare your actual duties against the ANZSCO description of your nominated occupation and decide whether the overlap is close enough. A similar-sounding job title is not the test — the substance of the work is. This is exactly why how competitive your specific occupation is matters as much as how many years you can point to: a broad, loosely-defined occupation gives an assessor more scope to accept adjacent roles, while a narrow, technical one does not.

A concrete example makes this less abstract. A candidate nominating as an External Auditor whose actual work history is three years of general bookkeeping and management accounting is likely to have those years queried or rejected outright — the tasks overlap in a loose, everyday sense, but they are not the same occupation under ANZSCO, and an auditor’s core duty of forming an independent audit opinion is simply absent from a bookkeeping role. The reverse can also bite: a registered nurse who spent two years in a purely administrative hospital role, without providing direct clinical care, may find that period excluded from a nursing-specific assessment even though it happened inside a hospital and reads as relevant on a CV. Assessing authorities are looking at what you actually did day to day, not the industry you did it in.

The 20-point cap, worked through

Part 6D.5 takes whatever the two tables produce, adds them, and stops at 20. Two worked examples show how easy it is to overestimate this factor:

The first candidate has genuinely more experience than the second — eleven years against five — and scores exactly the same amount past a certain point as someone with far less, because the cap doesn’t care how far past 20the raw sum goes. The second candidate’s experience is fully efficient: every year they have is reflected in their score. Knowing which situation you’re in changes what’s worth doing next.

Why onshore years are worth more

Compare the two tables directly and the incentive is obvious: Australian experience reaches the same points value in roughly a third of the time. One year in Australia scores 5; it takes 3 to 4 years overseas to score the same 5. This is deliberate — the points test rewards experience gained in the Australian labour market more heavily than equivalent experience gained anywhere else, on the reasoning that Australian work experience demonstrates something the points test cares about more directly: that you can actually work in this economy, in this occupation, under local conditions.

Part-time and casual work

This is one of the more commonly misjudged parts of a points claim. A candidate who worked reduced hours for family, study or visa reasons during part of their career often assumes those years count the same as full-time years — they usually don’t. Where hours fall meaningfully short of full-time, the safest assumption is that the period will be discounted or excluded rather than counted at face value, and the only way to know for certain is to have your specific history assessed rather than estimate it yourself.

Why your assessment may discount early years

Several assessing authorities apply a standard deduction to the period immediately after you completed your qualification, on the basis that those early months or years are treated as building basic competence rather than demonstrating fully skilled performance in the occupation. How much is deducted, and whether it applies to your qualification pathway at all, varies by authority and is set out in that authority’s own current guidelines — it is not a single economy-wide rule, and it is worth checking directly with your specific assessing body rather than assuming a figure from a forum post. This deduction can materially shrink a claimed employment history before it ever reaches the Schedule 6D tables, which is exactly why a skills assessment outcome and a person’s own year-count so often disagree.

Once you’re capped, stop waiting

The most common mistake this factor produces is not a wrong calculation — it’s wasted time. Once your overseas and Australian experience combined reach 20points, every additional year in the same job adds precisely nothing to your score, no matter how skilled or well-paid it is. If you’re in that position and still short of 65, the productive move is to look at every other way to add points, ranked by cost and time rather than assume more years at your current job will eventually help — it won’t.

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