Immigration Forum / Australia and NZ / January 2005

Hi,  I wrote 11 pages on the CBOK (RPL application form) including a
bibliography of books read, journals etc.  This was in addition to the 2
* 1000 word project reports.  I'm don't know if this was too much but I
got approved just before Christmas.  I think the main thing is to show
what you have learnt over your career, how your methods have changed,
how you keep up to date with new technologies etc rather than just
listing off what you did.  I did repeat a fair bit in the CBOK on my
project reports also.  Hope this helps!

I presume you do not have an IT degree which is why you are taking the
RPL approach?

The project reports are of importance, however in my experience they
were the easiest part to write!  I chose one project from around 3 years
ago and one more recent one. Wrote approx 1000 words on each and then
attached a couple of screenshots as appendices. Yes they are mandatory
and I think with your experience should be fairly straight forward.

I struggled a little more with the CBOK at first, luckily my agent was
very helpful (thanks George!). I would say my CBOK doc was a little over-
done, if I recall correctly it ended up being around 80 odd pages. I
would say that it is more than possible to complete the CBOK in 40 pages
(or less). Then again I say "better safe than sorry", I expect my
assessor fell asleep part way through and just passed me anyway or
jumped in terror when they saw the size of it.

However I have worked in a variety of IT programming roles and projects
including sales and am happy writing proposals and other professional
documents. I also included some Table of Contents from specifications
and proposals I had written, some brief code snippets and some screen
shots and plans etc.

I ended up writing about 8 of the CBOK areas:

Conceptual Modeling
Data Structures and Algorithms
Ethical/Social Implications/Professional Practice
Interpersonal Communications
Program Design and Implementation
Project Management
Software Engineering and Methodologies
Systems Analysis and Design

I had added a couple of others however, in the end on the advice of my
agent, I removed them as although I thought I had enough knoweldge on
those subjects it wasn't coming across in the writing properly.

The key thing with doing the CBOK is to write about WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNT
not what you have done, sounds easy, yet I found it very frustrating!!!

Good luck, I found once the CBOK was done the rest of the visa process
seemed rather simple!

alex

Can't remember how many pages mine ran to but it was 14,000+ words, plus
the two x 1000 word project reports.
I wrote something for evey topic I knew something about (I think I wrote
something for 13 or 14 topics, though some were a bit short). As the
others have said, the key thing is to show what you learned along the
way and how you learned it, not just what you did. I've heard people say
they wrote about as few as 8 of the CBOK topics and got a pass so I
couldn't say (and I doubt anyone else could) how much ACS require
specifically.
I pitched mine at somebody with above average technical knowledge and
like one of the others said, I pity the poor guy who had to digest it!

Thanks to those of you who replied.

Yes I don't have an IT degree, hence the dreaded RPL. I was however
anticipating a different route up until last week - the BCS one. I had
joined the BCS in September, then applied for Chartered status, which
was granted on 21/01/05. All too easy I was thinking, as this would have
satisfied the qualifications criteria. At least, that is, until I was
hit with the bombshell that they no longer accept BCS - apparently
because it's too easy to become chartered !!

So with hindsight I could have ignored the BCS, and started the RPL 4
months ago, and (maybe) had it finished by now. But, I'll just get on
and slog through it.

SUFS.