Behind the Nando’s Counter, the Skills Australia Wastes

Ishmeet Kaur arrived from India in 2015 with a telecommunications engineering qualification and a fair assumption. A country advertising a shortage of engineers would surely find room for one more. It did not. For more than a year she stood behind the counter of a Nando’s outlet in Perth, sending out applications that vanished without reply, before a contract role finally let her practise the profession she had trained for. Her story appears in research by Engineers Australia, and it is ordinary rather than exceptional. One recruiter, quoted in the same research, recalled clients who stated their instruction without embarrassment, no Indians. Kaur built a career and now works as a telecommunications engineer. Many others with the same qualifications never get that far. The loss is not only theirs.

A four billion dollar habit

There is a term for what happened to Kaur. Underemployment of skilled migrants, or brain waste, is the distance between what a migrant was trained to do and the work they can actually find. The Committee for Economic Development of Australia, an independent think tank better known as CEDA, has measured that distance in dollars. Its March 2024 report, Making Better Use of Migrants’ Skills, found that nearly one in four permanent skilled migrants works below their skill level. It put the cost at around four billion dollars in forgone wages each year, the product of recent migrants earning less than comparable Australian-born workers. Migrants who arrived two to six years earlier take home about 10 per cent less than similar locals. That shortfall can take 15 years to close. In licensed occupations, those forced out of their trained field earn at least 20 per cent less than they otherwise would.

A story that is now largely Indian

This matters more each year, because the Indian-Australian community is now the country’s largest migrant group. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures for 30 June 2025 count 971,020 people born in India living in Australia. That narrowly passed the 970,950 born in England, and put India at the top of the list for the first time on record. A decade earlier the India-born figure had been just 449,040, the fastest growth of any birthplace. China sits third, at about 732,000. Almost a third of the population, 32 per cent, was born overseas, the highest share since 1893. When Indian professionals lead skilled migration, brain waste becomes, in large part, a story about Indian qualifications left unused.

The recognition maze

The first hurdle is getting an overseas qualification recognised, and Australia effectively runs two gates. To win a skilled visa, an applicant has to pass a skills assessment by the relevant occupational authority. On paper, then, the credential has already been judged sufficient before the migrant lands. Employers apply a second test of their own, informal and unwritten, and often reach the opposite verdict.

George Tan and Andreas Cebulla, researchers at Flinders University, set out the contradiction in the journal International Migration in 2022. The government accepts overseas credentials in order to grant entry, while employers treat the same documents as unproven. Their study found roughly 23 per cent of permanent migrants stuck in a skills mismatch, and about a third going back to study in Australia to make qualifications already deemed adequate count a second time.

A 2026 review went further. Deji Shonuga, of the Victoria Institute of Technology, wrote in the journal Discover Global Society that between 70 and 80 per cent of skilled migrants are touched by non-recognition, and that more than 60 per cent slip into work beneath their training. The rules pile up by profession. Accountants must satisfy CPA Australia or Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand. The steepest falls come in the licensed professions, where without a local registration a migrant cannot practise at all.

Engineering, a profession migrants built

Nowhere is the waste plainer than in engineering. Engineers Australia, the profession’s peak body, reports that about 62 per cent of the engineering workforce was born overseas. In July 2023 its then chief executive, Romilly Madew AO, warned that more than 100,000 qualified engineers were in the country and, in her words, driving Ubers or doing some other kind of work not related to engineering. The skills crisis would only worsen, she said, until that pool of idle labour was drawn on. The same body found that 47 per cent of migrant engineers who were actively seeking engineering work were not employed in it.

An earlier survey of more than 800 migrant engineers named the five leading barriers, and every one turned on the same word. Local experience, local networks, local standards, local references, local qualifications. By October 2025 Engineers Australia put the number of underused overseas-born engineers at 133,000, and worked out that moving them into engineering roles could add 2.56 billion dollars to national output by 2030. Its national president, Dr Raj Aseervatham, was blunt. The talent is here, and the need is building fast.

Medicine, teaching and a rulebook that changes at every border

Regulated professions come with bottlenecks of their own. In 2023 the senior public servant Robyn Kruk AO led an independent review of the rules for overseas-trained health practitioners. She found needless duplication, long assessment delays, criminal-history checks repeated again and again, and slow allocation of Medicare provider numbers. All the while, the country faced a projected shortfall of more than 10,000 general practitioners by the early 2030s.

Kruk made two central recommendations. Fast-track applicants from trusted countries, and build a single tell-us-once portal to replace the tangle of agencies. Governments accepted the direction. From January 2022, more than 19,800 international practitioners registered for the first time, nearly 5,000 of them doctors.

Teaching shows the same problem from a different angle. A 2026 analysis by the Monash University researchers Sun Yee Yip and Heyi Lin found more than 20,000 qualified migrant teachers either shut out of classrooms or underemployed. Eight state and territory authorities each keep their own rulebook, and no single national pathway exists. Only 41 per cent of migrant women, the analysis found, hold jobs that match their qualifications.

The interview no one hears about

Even a qualification that clears every hurdle can be undone by a name. Mladen Adamovic, an academic now at King’s College London, ran a large field experiment. Earlier in his career he had worked at the University of Melbourne and Monash University. His team sent more than 12,000 near-identical applications to more than 4,000 advertised jobs in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. The names were rotated across six backgrounds, one of them Indian.

The results were stark. For non-leadership roles, applicants with English names drew a positive response 21.2 per cent of the time, against 11.6 per cent for ethnic-minority names. For leadership roles the gap grew wider still, 26.8 per cent against 11.3 per cent. For identical paperwork, minority candidates received roughly 57 per cent fewer positive replies. The 2023 study suggested recruiters were less able to picture a migrant in charge, a bias that quietly worsens every other barrier already in play.

What reform would look like

The fixes are not exotic, and they are not untested. The Kruk review points one way, with a single portal and a fast-track approach that treats recognition as a service to be delivered quickly rather than an obstacle course to be survived. Lining the eight teaching jurisdictions up behind one national standard would remove a barrier that is purely administrative. Paid internships and bridging placements, of the kind Engineers Australia has organised with employers, give migrants the very local experience employers demand, and break the circular trap in which experience cannot be had without a job and the job cannot be had without experience. Name-blind shortlisting, which strips identifying details before a human reads an application, goes straight at the hiring bias the Adamovic study measured. Not one of these changes depends on admitting a single new migrant. Each depends on making better use of the migrants already here.

The economic argument is strong enough to move even an employer short of staff. Billions in wages, and the output behind them, sit idle while the country argues about how many more people to let in. The sharper cost is harder to price. Behind every underemployment figure is a person who folded a career into a suitcase, passed every test a government set, and was then told to prove themselves once more from the bottom rung. For the Indian professionals who now make up Australia’s largest migrant community, recognition on paper has been easy to grant and slow to honour. Closing that gap calls less for new ideas than for the will to act on old ones.

Images in this article are AI-generated illustrations.