A Competency Demonstration Report is your gate pass to a promising career in Australia. Once the assessing authority EA (Engineers Australia) approves the CDR, it becomes an easy task to get a visa approval. The CDR helps EA assessors understand your past academic journey and the work experience that you have attained. It also helps them to gauge your future aspirations and the developmental journey that you have adopted. And, it does all of that by sharing details of some of the projects that you have been a part of and elaborating on your role. So the choice of these projects that you want to elaborate in the CDR is certainly a strategic decision. It should go well with the occupational role that you are applying that visa for and align well with the selected ANZSCO code.
As you begin to understand the process better, it will help if you go through the MSA (Migration Skills Assessment) booklet thoroughly. It is a one-stop guide for all your CDR related queries and elaborates on every section of the report. It also defines different competency elements for better understanding and a correct decision at your end.
Since you are working on your CDR, it’s safe to assume that you are an engineer with a certain amount of professional experience in your kitty. So you certainly are an expert in your domain. On the same lines, CDR writing also requires the expertise of a different kind: technical report writing, understanding of the domain, and a good understanding of written English, ability to structure and present the report well, check for content authenticity, and uniqueness.
Some ideas to work your way through the CDR smoothly:
1. Identify the projects where you had a meaty role to play and your contribution was absolutely required to achieve the desired goals
2. The expert assessors are not keen to know about the organization history or team objectives. It is you whom they are assessing and nothing else. So elaborate on your role, duties and responsibilities, through an Organogram.
3. Do not use heavy technical representations, jargons, graphical representations, or calculations in the report. Keep it simple while making them understand your contributions to the eventual goal well.
4. Use the opportunity wisely to demonstrate your technical prowess and stress upon your contributions by using sentences like “I calculated”, “I established”, “I designed”, etc.
5. Elaborate on any design projects that you have undertaken or let them know of professional achievements that make you stand out
6. Share how you worked for the benefit of the employees and the environment
7. Ensure that the report is unique and tells your story
8. It should perfectly match up to the degree and work experience claims that you have made in the report.
So the above mentioned are some of the ideas that you can adapt to write and deliver a good CDR. Look out for experienced CDR writers to help you with your reports, if you aren’t sure of doing this task yourself with complete conviction.