Hi Judy
I'm really sorry to hear this.
Please look at this link:
Go Matilda - Your Gateway to Australia - News
And also at this thread:
http://www.pomsinoz.com/forum/migrat...sessments.html
I know that Hubby isn't any of the things on Alan's original list, but if you sift though his news articles, locksmiths and floor finishers weren't on the original list either.
There is at least one company offering to do AQFIII workplace assessments in the UK. This is the one I've come across:
Australian Construction Training
I gather that in the UK they are called ACT Services and apparently they have been at the recent expos in the UK.
I don't know whether they have anything similar going in the States. Also, they do seem to be more costly than Alan's idea of the candidate only going to Oz for a couple of weeks. Around £3,700 sterling plus VAT at 17.5%. I've heard, to do an assessment via ACT Services in the UK.
I've also seen at least one thread where the guy contacted all the TAFEs in Oz that provide courses in whatever his skill was, and he seemed to think that he had made private arrangements, direct with a TAFE, to go and have the workplace assessment done there.
As you can see from Alan's various articles, there is nothing further from TRA as yet and I don't think anyone is holding his/her breath particularly because everything that involves a bunch of civil servants and other assorted bureaucrats always seems to take forever to sort out and usually only half-works even when they've finished dabbling with it.
The civil service in the UK wastes simply criminal amounts of time and money wandering around from one meeting to another, as if meetings keep the world revolving on its axis, and when they get to these meetings all they do is recycle hot air anyway. It is a total waste of time in my observation, costs a mint because they think nothing of flying people in from far and wide, and I've yet to see 30 people round a table end up with anything remotely valuable anyway! It takes MONTHS to organise one of these meetings because they all spend so much time recycling hot air in other equally pointless meetings and so on.
You can imagine how I CRINGED the day a DIAC employee told me proudly, "Our Civil Service is modelled on the British one!" I thought, "J, M, &J! There is no blinking hope, then!"
Best wishes
Gill
But if we did get accepted it would be worth it. 
