Critical Skills Employment Permit Refused - Ireland

[snowhit3]

Hello All,

I currently work as a Junior IT Systems Administrator with remuneration above 32000EUR. My employer applied for my CSEP permit recently

I got the email yesterday from DETE that my CSEP application has been refused. This is the reason mentioned by them:

It appears from the information received that the minimum annual
remuneration is under €64,000 and the category of employment is not one of
the employment's specified in regulation 18(1)(a) and Schedule 3 of the
Employment Permits Regulations 2017 (S.I. No. 95 of 2017) (as amended)
eligible for a Critical Skills Employment Permit with this level of
remuneration. Please note that the occupation in question is not on the
Critical Skills Occupations List. In line with section 12(3) of the
Employment Permits Act 2006 (as amended) an employment permit cannot be
issued.

I am not sure of what happened. I thought IT system administrator job falls under critical skills. One thing to note is my employer gave the title "Jnr SysAdmin" on the application form, maybe that caused a confusion with the DETE officer.

I dont know if I should appeal the decision or get all the information sorted and submit a fresh application as the dates on Appeal are showing are few months before.

Would love to know your thoughts and opinion

[meself2]

according to https://onsdigital.github.io/dp-classif ... _tool.html, system administrators are 3131: IT OPERATIONS TECHNICIANS
cannot find it on the CSEP eligible list, so the refusal might be right
what code you were applying as?

[meself2]

what do you do, what are your job responsibilities?
if you have something that lines up with eg 2316 as your main job reponsibility, ie you're more doing development than administration/maintenance, possible option is to change job title to reflect this responsibility
have a chat with HR/immigration professionals if your work provides that, maybe they'll offer an option as you might have to tailor your work for CSEP

[littlerr]

IT system admins do not fall into critical skills list. You must be either an IT system manager or have relevant R&D related skills as part of your job roles (i.e. you need to part of a development team rather than maintaining systems alone).

[snowhit3]

what do you do, what are your job responsibilities?
if you have something that lines up with eg 2316 as your main job reponsibility, ie you're more doing development than administration/maintenance, possible option is to change job title to reflect this responsibility
have a chat with HR/immigration professionals if your work provides that, maybe they'll offer an option as you might have to tailor your work for CSEP

Thanks for that link mate. Now the things are clear. Even though my job title is is system administrator. I'm doing all the works of an it infrastructure engineer for them ranging from managing their storage, virtualization, network things (mainly focusing on VMware). Doing patches, upgrades to servers. Managing their email and phone solutions etc.

I checked it infrastructure engineer or it systems engineer and they both falls under critical skills.

I have forwarded all that to our HR. Waiting foran update next week

[snowhit3]

IT system admins do not fall into critical skills list. You must be either an IT system manager or have relevant R&D related skills as part of your job roles (i.e. you need to part of a development team rather than maintaining systems alone).

I have asked hr to maybe change the title to infrastructure engineer or it system engineer. The HR is also new to all this. I am waiting for their response next week

[snowhit3]

IT system admins do not fall into critical skills list. You must be either an IT system manager or have relevant R&D related skills as part of your job roles (i.e. you need to part of a development team rather than maintaining systems alone).

what do you do, what are your job responsibilities?
if you have something that lines up with eg 2316 as your main job reponsibility, ie you're more doing development than administration/maintenance, possible option is to change job title to reflect this responsibility
have a chat with HR/immigration professionals if your work provides that, maybe they'll offer an option as you might have to tailor your work for CSEP

Lads, I had chat with the HR and they agreed to change the title to IT Infrastructure Engineer. Which comes under SOC code 2135. I had discussed with my manager and HR and came up with this job responsibilities, Would be good to hear your opinion on it

- Responsible for designing, configuring, and implementing new servers, storage, networking and HPC (High Performance Computing) infrastructure including physical and virtual servers, network switch, web proxies, load balancers, SAN storage, WAN/LAN, and Wireless infrastructure. It also includes support and maintenance of existing systems, virtualization and VDI infrastructure, and configurations. This includes multivendor solutions like HPE, DELL, Cisco, Juniper, Aruba, and Adtran

- Configure firewall, webfilters, IP telephony, DNS/DHCP, routing and switching to maximize network efficiency and user experience.

- Work closely with the clients to implement new projects and systems by researching the technical aspects and feasibility, performing the integration checks on the existing platforms, and creating implementation plans, and the associated benefits for customers. Once approved, perform the said implementation for the customer in a timely manner.

- Research, analyze, and evaluate the emerging infrastructure technologies for clients. Advise them on the potential improvement to achieve optimum performance. Fine-tune the existing hardware and software to improve its performance under high load

- Plan, test and verify backups, Disaster recovery and business continuity process and systems. This includes active-active and active-passive HA (High availability) clustering, tape drive archiving and multi-stie failover clustering

- Analyze and optimize existing ETL pipelining workflows to optimise the infrastructure resource usage and reduce the total turnaround time.

- Write unit test cases, custom automation script, PowerShell scripts, and automated infrastructure health checks according to customer's needs to test and verify individual parts of a system, business process, or infrastructure hardware.

- Liaise with clients, 3rd party vendors and manufacturers to analyse business process, clarify client requirement and to define scope of existing hardware, virtualization, storage and network infrastructure provisioning.

- Act as the L2 and L3 escalation point for investigating and troubleshooting Exchange Email system, Microsoft Lync VoIP, Skype for Business, Citrix, Microsoft TMG firewall, vendor specific virtual Spam (Amazon AWS, Fortinet, Sophos) and windows servers

- Provide L3 infrastructure, virtualization and VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) troubleshooting and support to the customer and their business partners

- Actively monitor, manage and troubleshoot the VMWare virtualization infrastructure for production, development and DMZ zones. Responsible for snapshots, cloud cluster migration, decommissioning and adding disks. Also, manage and improve the customer's Citrix VDI infrastructure for smooth performance and high uptime

- Proactive monitoring of infrastructure to identify and solve any potential Software or hardware faults before it affects the business and/or delivery of service.

- plan, schedule, and control the build, test, and deployment of patching, security updates, OS upgrades and software upgrades via Microsoft SCCM.

-  Proactively work to improve reliability, stability and security of the ICT infrastructure environment

- Develop and maintain documentation for supported applications, and processes for IT staffs

- Work closely with security team to improve the security and user’s privacy in the environment. Plan, implement and administer policies, Antivirus systems and perform Incidence response

[meself2]

sounds good for me, but we're not DETE

[littlerr]

The job title and responsibilities are certainly good. However, your HR should be prepared to answer questions from DETE as to why the title and responsibilities are different from what they initially applied.

[snowhit3]

The job title and responsibilities are certainly good. However, your HR should be prepared to answer questions from DETE as to why the title and responsibilities are different from what they initially applied.

Thanks for the info mate. I will give a heads up to my HR. BTW, they decided to file a new application rather than appeal. Do they still have to explain the difference?

[littlerr]

DETE usually is quite determined to get to the bottom of everything, at least that was my feeling in the past. Not sure if they are still like that. It’s always good to be prepared.

[snowhit3]

DETE usually is quite determined to get to the bottom of everything, at least that was my feeling in the past. Not sure if they are still like that. It’s always good to be prepared.

sounds good for me, but we're not DETE

Thanks lads for all the help in pointing me in the right direction. My new CSEP application was approved last week.

[meself2]

Congrats, good to know! Thanks for coming back and confirming.