Date restrictions on employer reference letters for PR?

[Sarah101]

Hello,

 

I'm still 18 months off from applying for my PR, all being well and if I keep my job. But I'm aware that staff are moving on quite quickly at my former companies, so I'm keen to gather reference letters on headed paper sooner rather than later. Also, I worked in a third country for a while so there could be language barriers to obtaining these references, so keen to get going.

 

I've seen that the letters should be dated - but is there a time period they need to be dated as, eg. six months before the application is submitted say? If I gather them now, will be essentially be useless?

 

Any help on this is much appreciated

 

Thank you!

[SiameseCat]

I would say you only need to make sure the reference reflects the time period of work for which you are claiming points for. If you're 18 months away from applying and claim points for another 12+ months of work experience then you would need a reference to back your claim. You'd get asked for it during your skills assessment anyway.

 

I only used 'personal' references (work colleagues/manager) during my skills assessment. When it came to submitting my PR visa which was around 6 months later, I just asked for an additional generic reference from HR confirming I was still employed with the same company. But there's many other ways of doing it, such as providing tax records, payslips etc