ACS: Skills Assessment for IT (ICT) Occupations

ACS (the Australian Computer Society) is the skills assessing authority for information technology occupations — programmers, systems analysts, software engineers, network administrators and many other ICT roles. If the occupation you nominate is in this group, your skills assessment will almost certainly go through ACS.

Who ACS suits

ACS assesses whether your qualifications and experience match an ICT occupation code in the ANZSCO system. An important point: ACS looks at both the content of your qualification (whether it has enough ICT “content”) and your work experience, and these two parts affect each other.

The main pathways

ACS has several different pathways depending on your case: a pathway for people with a suitable ICT qualification, the RPL (Recognition of Prior Learning) pathway for people whose qualification is not in ICT but who have experience, and a pathway for people who have just finished study in Australia. Choosing the right pathway from the start is worth the time — the wrong pathway is a common reason for delay.

Fees and timing

The ACS assessment fee varies by the type of assessment (for example a skills assessment or RPL) and by the time of application — see the official fee schedule on the ACS website. As for timing, processing time varies by assessment type and the volume of applications — check the current timeframes on the official ACS website; in addition, the quality of the application you submit also has a significant effect.

Where applicants commonly get stuck

Two common issues: a qualification assessed by ACS as lacking ICT content (which must be made up with experience, deducting some years of experience), and a job description that is not clear enough to prove the right occupation code. Because these details shape the outcome, an ICT application with weak points should be reviewed by a registered migration agent (MARA) before lodging.