How A Credential Evaluator Can Help With Difficult Degrees
How A Credential Evaluator Can Help With Difficult Degrees Read More »
Visa Approvals
Chartered Accountancy/CPA Around the Globe – Which ones are equivalent to a Degree?
In India, the CA and the ICWAI have full government degree recognition, and the UK CA is now fully integrated into the degree system. However, not every UK CA you will counts as a degree. Some UK CA qualifications fall outside of degree eligibility, and older UK CA certifications are not recognized in the degree because they were earned before this educational track was integrated into the degree system.
In many cases, accounting is simply regarded as a degree, plain and simple. It depends on the country of the certification’s origin and the stages of education required to earn this certification. Degrees that don’t call themselves degrees are complicated. If your client has a CA, don’t wait for an education RFE. Talk to a credential evaluator and have your client’s education reviewed.
About the Author
Sheila Danzig
Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of CCI, TheDegreePeople.com, a foreign credentials evaluation agency. For a no-charge analysis of any difficult case, RFE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/? or call 800.771.4723.
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Building Your Immigration Practice: Should You Write a Book?
- Do I have a book concept that REALLY inspires me? Ask yourself, is there anything you know enough about that will drive you to set aside time to work on your book even when you’re busy? Is this concept so compelling to you that you are willing to make it a central focus of your law practice for the next few years? Are you inspired by the topic to the extent that you are willing to pass up short-term opportunities to focus on the long-term goal of getting your book out there? Writing a book is a process, and if you’re not inspired by the concept you won’t have the energy to complete this process.
- Do you REALLY want to be a writer? When you commit to writing a book, you commit to being an author. This means doing things that authors do like giving talks and webinars, maintaining a blog, publishing articles, and, of course, actually writing your book. However, you don’t technically have to be a writer to be an author. If you have all of the expertise and information but writing isn’t really your passion or practice, you can hire a ghostwriter to help you.
- You have an audience ready to buy your book.
- You have a marketing plan to promote your book when it comes out.
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Who is to Blame for Your H1B RFE?
But whose fault is it REALLY and why does it matter whose fault it is anyway?
True, sometimes it is the attorney or evaluators fault, but sometimes it is CIS’s fault.
Sometimes it is the fault of the evaluation but not the evaluator.
Sometimes it is CIS’s fault.
Sometimes it is the candidate’s fault.
Sometimes it is no one’s fault at all.
It matters because there is absolutely no reason to get a new attorney or a new evaluator at this stage of the process if the RFE was not their fault.
The first step to successfully responding to an RFE is to understand what is being asked for, and of whom is it being asked, and which party can provide the necessary evidence. Knowing who is at fault for the RFE is a big part of understanding how to move forward.
When is it the attorney’s fault?
Very rarely, an attorney will file an application incorrectly. Generally, however, the attorney error occurs when the candidate’s education is not reviewed by an education specialist before the application is filed. In this case, the candidate’s account of their education and experience is incorrect or does not meet the CIS requirements for the H1-B. Unless this is the case, don’t fire your attorney over an RFE.
When is it the evaluator’s fault, and how can it be the fault of the evaluation but NOT the person who wrote the evaluation?
There are situations when the RFE is clearly the evaluator’s fault because the evaluation was done incorrectly. For example, when a non-accredited PGD is listed as accredited, CIS jumps on that inaccuracy to issue an RFE. This rarely happens, because most evaluators are highly trained in spotting unaccredited education.
However, every evaluation is different, and evaluations for different Visas must be written very differently. When an evaluator writes an evaluation for any particular visa, he or she needs to know both the Visa regulations AND current CIS trends. Not every evaluation agency is aware of the Visa regulations. The evaluator may have provided the evaluation ordered by the client, only to find that the equivalence does not work for the particular Visa. For example, if you have a four-year degree in electrical engineering, you can receive an evaluation written correctly showing an equivalency to a US bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, but then receive an RFE anyway because your job is in the field of computer software analysis. This sort of mismatch triggered an onslaught of RFEs this year. The evaluator did a good job, but the evaluation was not correct for the purposes of the Visa. In this case, you may have likely found the right evaluator, but he or she provided you with the wrong evaluation even though they acted in good faith. To avoid this, make sure you order your evaluation from an agency that knows education regulations for each Visa. If you advise an evaluation agency that you need an evaluation for an H1-B visa and they don’t ask about the job offer, find a new agency. The degree must precisely fit the field of employment for this Visa and the evaluator needs to know this information so they can evaluate an equivalency to the proper degree. If you are not asked about the job offer, the agency does not look at the Visa regulations and is not right for this job.
If you have already paid an evaluator and a mistake was made, I suggest you go back to that evaluator to try to address your RFE. However, if the evaluation agency did not make sure that the evaluation was written for the particular Visa it was ordered for, that may just be how they operate. There is nothing wrong with that unless they lead you to believe that they evaluate for immigration and meet Visa requirements as part of their service. They may just be writing standard evaluations and not be authorized to make the conversions from work experience to education, which is necessary to prove equivalency between fields or across educational system structures. You cannot expect an agency to do something they don’t claim to do. So the evaluation agency you want and need is one that will look at the education, as well as the visa requirements and current CIS trends.
When is it CIS’s fault?
Government bureaucracies make mistakes and some RFEs are simply factually incorrect. Everything in a petition could be done correctly and you can still receive an RFE. Often when CIS is at fault, the RFE will state that an accredited university is not accredited, or that a qualified evaluator is not qualified. While these RFEs are frustrating, they are usually also easy fixes. With the help of your evaluator, you can easily provide]]>
How to Optimize Time Sponsoring 2017 H1B Clients and Employees
For these reasons, most STEM companies in the United States that have the resources to sponsor H-1B visas do. This can cost a company anywhere from $2,500 to 10,000 in legal fees and USCIS fees per H-1B employee. While this cost may sound substantial, it is actually a great investment in a company’s future and is even reasonable on paper when viewed in relation to the salaries of H-1B workers. H-1B visa holders can stay on to work with a company for up to six years, and since this is a visa of dual intent, the employer may decide to sponsor the employee for their Green Card down the road. This is an investment in the expansion of a company, as well as a way for the team to build an international perspective into the framework of how they do business. Money is not the issue that stands in the way. Viable companies budget for investment potential as a business strategy. The issue tends to be time.
Preparing an H-1B visa petition can take up the better part of a year. It does not have to, but it’s always a good idea to start making hiring decisions early on for companies looking to sponsor H-1B employees. If your company or your client’s company is ready to sponsor H-1B employees for the fiscal year of 2017, all petitions need to be submitted to USCIS on April 1st of 2016. That’s just under four months away. While the technical deadline for H-1B visa petitions is October 1st, there are only 65,000 annual H-1B visas available and literally hundreds of thousands of H-1B candidates applying for them. There is no annual cap for H-1B jobs in the non-profit sector or for government-funded research foundations, but these kinds of jobs do not cover the needs of the private STEM industry companies that need H-1B employees the most. Even companies like Microsoft tend to only get around half of the H-1B visas they petition for. If your company or your client’s company wants H-1B visa workers for 2017, it’s time to get those petitions ready.
At TheDegreePeople.com, we understand that preparing a petition takes time and can become very stressful. Having an advanced degree from a country outside of the United States – particularly from countries like India that have three-year bachelor’s degrees instead of four-year degrees – can cause trouble. If your employee or client has a degree specialized in a field related to but not exactly matching their field of employ, this can also cause trouble. There are many reasons your client or employee’s education can cause confusion when their petition is filed. Everything from mistranslations to confusion about credit hours can trigger an RFE or a Denial for an over-qualified, clearly adept H-1B visa candidate. Making sure your client or employee submits an accurate credential evaluation that meets the requirements of his or her H-1B visa along with the rest of the petition on April 1st is an essential way to save you time NOW and save you more time LATER. Don’t wait for an RFE, Denial, or NOID to address your client or employee’s education. We offer a variety of low-cost rush delivery options for the last minute, no-cost consultations on your situation, and we can address your complicated cases quickly and successfully.
About the Author
Sheila Danzig
Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of TheDegreePeople.com a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/?CodeBLG/ or call 800.771.4723.]]>
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Job Description and the Degree Requirement: Is Your Candidate H-1B Qualified?
st. If the past several years are any indication of what is to come, you will only have a five-day window to get your client or employee’s petition in the H-1B lottery.
Before you even get started, there are two very important questions about whether or not the job and the employee are H-1B qualified you and your client or employee should be asking:
- Is the job itself a specialty occupation?
- Is my employee or client educationally qualified for this specialty occupation?
To qualify for H-1B visa status, the job must require a US bachelor’s degree or its equivalent or higher to show that the position requires the employee to possess specialized skills and knowledge to carry out successfully. Mid-sized companies in particular are asked to justify why someone with a bachelor’s degree or higher is required for the job, and you need to show this through evidence and documentation. For example, the ad for the job can be used as proof if it indicates that as a minimum qualification the employee must have a bachelor’s degree or higher. You can also show that similar jobs for similar companies also have these specialized requirements. However, if the job requires a generalized degree – even if it is a bachelor’s degree – you may run into problems because a generalized degree does not indicate that specialized knowledge and skills are required. This is where alternative forms of evidence, like expert opinion letters and examples of similar jobs for similar companies come in particular handy. It is on you to prove that you require a highly skilled employee with a specialized knowledge base to successfully carry out the duties of an H-1B job.
Say you’ve established that your company absolutely needs an employee with a bachelor’s degree or higher and a specialized knowledge base and skill set to carry out the duties of this H-1B position. NOW you need to show that your H-1B candidate is that employee with the required education and specialized knowledge base and skill set. How do you do this? If your candidate has a bachelor’s degree or higher from a US college or university with a major that is an exact fit for their field of employ, it is straightforward. If your candidate has a degree from a different country or with a major in a different field – even if it’s in a related field – from their field of employ, you will need to take one more step to meet this H-1B requirement.
CIS does not accept a three-year degree as the equivalent of a US four-year degree at face value. However, when evaluated for academic course content, an evaluation agency with the authority to convert classroom contact hours into college credit can use this technique to take a close look at your client or employee’s degree and bridge the missing year. An evaluator with the authority to convert years of work experience into college credit can follow the 3-1 rule and convert three years of progressive work experience in the field into one year of college credit. Both of these careful evaluation methods can also be utilized to show specialization in the candidate’s field of employ if they have worked in the field or taken enough classes throughout their college career in that field.
Don’t wait until it’s too late to get started on your employee or client’s H-1B petition. This is US immigration, which means it’s a bundle of details and documentation that often takes time and energy to get in order. If your client or employee needs a credential evaluation to show that they meet CIS educational requirements, start looking for the right credential evaluation agency to meet your needs. The right agency should be able to right an evaluation as unique as your client’s education, and they should have a firm understanding of CIS trends and the different academic requirements for different visas.
About the Author
Sheila Danzig
Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of CCI, TheDegreePeople.com, a foreign credentials evaluation agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://www.ccifree.com or call 800.771.4723.
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What’s Standing Between Your Genius Client or Employee and Their Visa?
While sponsoring an employee’s work Visa can cost a company anywhere from $2,500-10,000 in legal fees and USCIS fees, it’s not the money that gets in the way of your genius client or employee obtaining his or her Visa. The fact of the matter is, many of the most brilliant minds followed eclectic or non-traditional educational paths to get to where they are. Common Visas for highly skilled workers – the H-1B Visa and the EB2 Visa – requires a candidates’ degree specializations to be an exact match for their job offers. However, it is common for talented engineers to have earned their degrees in related fields or vastly different fields. Some are largely or completely self-taught and have all of the skills and know-how through solo learning, work experience, and other non-traditional training opportunities.
For these reasons, while companies may jump at the opportunity to take these brilliant minds on to become assets to their companies and to US STEM industries, CIS educational requirements for Visas stand in the way.
Does this mean your client or employee with the specialized skills and knowledge to excel at their job cannot get their Visa because their degree doesn’t match?
Of course not!
A credential evaluator with extensive knowledge and experience with international education complexities, as well as CIS trends and federal case law can take a close look at your client or employee’s educational content and work experience. This way, an equivalency can be written to show that your client or employee has the equivalent of the degree necessary in the specialization necessary to qualify for his or her specialty occupation.
However, different work Visas have different requirements for where these educational equivalencies must come from. For example, if your client or employee is petitioning for an H-1B Visa and has a bachelor’s degree that is not an exact match for their field of employ, but has three years of work experience in the field, their education can be combined with the years of progressive work experience to write an equivalency that their degree is in their field of employ. Work experience and education can be combined to bridge that gap. However, if your client or employee is petitioning for an EB2 Visa and runs into that same problem, the evaluator must handle this differently because the particular Visa requires a single source degree.
Not all evaluation agencies know how to write the evaluation your client or employee needs for his or her particular Visa. When you call in to see if you want to work with any given agency, make sure that they are aware of CIS trends as well as the different educational requirements for different Visas. For example, if you let an agency know that your employee needs an evaluation for an H-1B Visa, they should quickly ask what the job offer is. If they don’t, look elsewhere. You want an evaluation agency that will tailor the evaluation to fit the needs of your client or employee’s unique situation and Visa. In essence, the evaluation must be as complex and unique as the genius it’s written for.
About the Author
Sheila Danzig
Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com, a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFE, Denial, or NOID, please go to http://www.ccifree.com or call 800.771.4723.]]>
What’s Standing Between Your Genius Client or Employee and Their Visa? Read More »
It’s Easier to Prevent an EB2 RFE than to Overturn One
- Your bachelor’s degree MUST be a single source degree. This is where this first factor can get tricky. With other Visas like the H1B Visa, CIS allows candidates’ evaluators to combine work experience with years of college to equate to a bachelor’s degree. This is NOT the case with EB2, the bachelor’s degree must be from a single source degree. To work around this, you must find an evaluator well-versed in federal case law that allows for using five years of work experience to show equivalence to a US Master’s Degree. At CCI we can do this, and it takes a LOT of research, evidence, and documentation.
- Beware of mistranslations. If your transcripts and educational documents needed to be translated into English, the value of your degree may have been inadvertently changed in translation. One common mistranslation is Baccalaureate to Bachelor’s degree, and these degrees are NOT the same. Similarly, the Russian specialist degree is often mistranslated as well. The kandidat naouk is generally the equivalent to a US doctorate, but cannot be TRANSLATED as a doctorate degree.
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It’s Easier to Prevent an RFE than to Overturn One
st, 2016. That means CIS does not have to issue an RFE to get the information they need out of you to make an informed decision. Preventing an RFE is much easier than answering one.
An RFE is a tool CIS uses to make the right decision about your petition. When they cannot make a decision based on the evidence you provided, they request more. While this is not the end of the world, and can actually be utilized as an opportunity to strengthen your case, an RFE is a red flag. A red flag is another tool CIS uses to streamline the massive amount of work they have to do to cut 233,000 petitions into 65,000 Visas. If you receive an RFE, that means a glaring omission of evidence has drawn CIS’s close attention to your petition, and it will now be picked apart. Minor errors that would have otherwise gone unnoticed will come to light.
At the same time, answering an RFE is not necessarily a straight-forward process. To successfully answer an RFE, you need to sit down with your lawyer, your employer, and your evaluator to see exactly what is being asked of you and how to go about answering it. Some RFE’s are realistically impossible to answer. The “Nightmare” RFE is one of these, and we’ve been seeing more of them every year. While these can be answered, it requires strategy that only an evaluation agency with international education and federal case law experts on hand to work on your case. At CCI, we have been able to get around 95% of all of the Nightmare RFE’s we work on overturned, but these RFE’s cause a lot of unnecessary stress to H1B candidates and can be easily avoided.
How can you avoid an RFE in the first place?
- Triple-check your answers on all of your documents and forms for consistency. Inconsistent answers – even if they are small mistakes – can trigger an RFE.
- Prove that your H1B job is a specialty occupation requiring a US bachelor’s degree or its equivalence or higher. You can do this by showing the ad for your job, documentation that similar jobs for similar companies require a bachelor’s degree or higher, and with an expert letter.
- Clearly show that your degree is a US bachelor’s degree or higher or its equivalent. If your degree is from outside of the US, you will need to have your education evaluated by an authorized credential evaluation agency. If you have a three-year degree, you will need to find an agency with the authority and expertise to convert classroom contact hours and years of work experience into college credit hours to account for the missing fourth year.
- Your degree must be specialized. This means if you have a liberal arts degree, or a generalized degree, CIS will not accept this as proof that you actually possess the specialized skills and knowledge necessary to be qualified for your H1B job. If you have a generalized degree, you need to talk to a credential evaluation agency that will take a close look at your course content and your work experience, and make the proper conversions to college credit hours to show equivalence to a specialized degree.
- Your degree must EXACTLY fit your job offer. This means that even though your employer hired you because your degree in a related field and your experience working in the field was enough to prove to them you have the specialized skills and experience necessary to be successful in your new job, CIS needs more. If your degree is not an EXACT fit for your job, you need a credential evaluation from an evaluator who can take a close look at the course content of your degree and make the necessary conversions, and who can also convert your years of work experience in the field into college credit to show equivalency to the exact degree CIS requires you to have.
Don’t wait for the opportunity to overturn an RFE. Remember, an RFE is a big red flag waving high over your petition. The best way to address an RFE is to avoid it. Don’t give CIS an excuse to nit pick your petition. Tell them everything they need to know to make an informed decision on your petition the first time.
About the Author
Sheila Danzig
Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFEs, Denials, or NOIDs, please go to http://www.ccifree.com or call 800.771.4723. Mention that you saw this in the ILW article and get 72 hour rush service at no charge.]]>
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The Top 3 Reasons for Education H1-B RFEs
Why are there so many education RFEs?
Reason #1 – The candidate’s education equivalence does not match the job offer.
Reason #2 – See Reason #1.
Reason #3 – See Reasons #1 and #2.
Aren’t there any other reasons CIS would call a candidate’s education into question? Not really. There are small issues where CIS requests additional or more complete education documentation, but 90% of the RFEs are about the education equivalence not matching the title of the job offer. Education RFEs are very common because while employers will hire employees with degrees in related fields, CIS requires an H1-B employee’s degree to be an exact match for their job.
Many evaluation agencies write standard evaluations of foreign credentials without taking particular Visa requirements, federal case law, and CIS trends into account. In these situations, you will likely have an accurate evaluation, but your degree still will not match your job offer. This is an example of a good evaluator writing the wrong evaluation.
Well, you might get lucky and slide through, right? So why not just wait for an RFE to submit the education evaluation that CIS wants? Luck HAS worked reasonably well up until just recently. Some petitions did manage to slide by, but in the past two years we started seeing the “Nightmare” RFE begin to increase. If your degree or your degree evaluation does not match your job offer, you will likely run into problems with CIS, and the “Nightmare” RFE is a problem you never want to have to face. This is an extremely complicated RFE that is literally impossible to answer. While no one knows what triggers these particular RFEs, we DO know that they almost always occur when the candidate’s education does not match the job offer.
Send in a credential evaluation that takes your work experience and course content into account to fill in the gaps between your degree and your job offer before you have to do it the hard way. A simple work experience evaluation can prevent this “Nightmare” experience.
If it’s too late and you have already received a “Nightmare” RFE – also known as the “Kitchen Sink” RFE because absolutely everything is in it but the kitchen sink – we can help you. While this RFE cannot actually be met as written, we have developed a systematic approach to addressing this RFE that has worked 95% of the time.
To learn more about the Nightmare RFE, check out my article http://discuss.ilw.com/content.php?4449-Article-You-Can-Beat-The-Nightmare-RFE-for-H1B-By-Sheila-Danzig. You CAN beat the “Nightmare” RFE, but why do it if you don’t have to? Don’t risk this “Nightmare” scenario. Get your credentials evaluated by an evaluation agency with the authority to convert work experience in your field of employ into college credit. Some agencies simply do not write these kinds of evaluations. When you talk to them on the phone, tell them that you need an education evaluation for an H1-B Visa petition. If they don’t ask about your job offer, look elsewhere. You need an evaluator knowledgeable about international education as well as CIS trends.
About the Author
Sheila Danzig
Sheila Danzig is the Executive Director of CCI TheDegreePeople.com a Foreign Credentials Evaluation Agency. For a no charge analysis of any difficult case, RFEs, Denials, or NOIDs, please go to http://www.ccifree.com/ or call 800.771.4723. Mention that you saw this in the ILW article and get 72 hour rush service at no charge.]]>