Skills assessment: TRA, migration, and recognition of prior learning

Two very different things get called "skills assessment", and mixing them up wastes a lot of time.

1. Migration skills assessment — an assessment against an occupation, for a visa, conducted by an authorised assessing authority
2. Recognition of prior learning (RPL) — an assessment against units of competency, for a qualification, conducted by an RTO

We do both, under two separate regulatory regimes. This page explains which is which, and what each one cannot do.

How to start a TRA assessment with us

For the migration-assessment service described on our current source page, email your current CV or résumé to skillsassessment@cht.edu.au and request the free, no-obligation pre-assessment and eligibility check. Tell us whether you are seeking assessment as Cook (ANZSCO 351411) or Chef (ANZSCO 351311) and which TRA program or visa pathway you are considering. The source page describes an application and document review, then a technical interview where required, before TRA makes the final decision.

Do not pay or assume eligibility from a summary here. The evidence requirements, program rules, fees and processing times depend on your circumstances and can change. Confirm the applicable current instructions with Trades Recognition Australia and our skills-assessment team before lodging or paying. We can help you understand the process; we cannot grant a visa or guarantee a positive TRA outcome.

Migration skills assessment through TRA

We are on Trades Recognition Australia's published RTO Finder as a TRA-approved RTO authorised to conduct skills assessments for Chef and Cook, under both the Temporary Skills Shortage (TSS) Skills Assessment Program and the Offshore Skills Assessment Program (OSAP).

What TRA is, and is not

TRA is not a VET regulator. It sits inside a federal department and is one of 39 approved skilled migration assessing authorities authorised under the Migration Regulations, responsible for assessing applicants for 133 of the 674 occupations on the Skilled Occupation List maintained by the Department of Home Affairs.

Its authority comes from reg 2.26B, which lets TRA set the skills standards an applicant is assessed against, and set different standards for different visa classes.

This is a third distinct regulatory regime for us, alongside ASQA registration under the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 and CRICOS registration under the ESOS framework. They are separate systems with separate obligations, and a provider's standing in one says nothing about the others.

See about us for the full registration record.

Chef and Cook are different occupations

The Australian Bureau of Statistics defines Chef (ANZSCO 351311) as planning and organising the preparation and cooking of food in dining and catering establishments, and expressly excludes Cooks, Fast Food Cooks and Kitchenhands from that unit group.

So Chef and Cook are not interchangeable labels for the same job. An application assessed against the wrong occupation is a wasted application, and which one applies depends on the actual duties performed, not on a job title an employer chose. A person whose work is planning menus, costing them, ordering and supervising a brigade is doing Chef work; a person cooking to someone else's menu and direction is doing Cook work.

The occupation that is not there

This is the most important limit on the page, and it disappoints a lot of people late.

Cafe or Restaurant Manager is not on the Core Skills Occupation List. There is no equivalent TRA pathway for it, and no hospitality management qualification creates one. So:

• SIT40422 Certificate IV in Hospitality, CRICOS 116358F — a supervision qualification, and not a migration pathway
• SIT50422 Diploma of Hospitality Management, CRICOS 115534C — our senior qualification, and not a migration pathway
• SIT50322 Diploma of Event Management, CRICOS 118427D — not a migration pathway

Those three are the CRICOS-registered courses, which is exactly the trap: the courses an international student can enrol in are the ones with no migration route, and the two cookery qualifications that sit closest to the assessable occupations are not CRICOS-registered.

If a migration outcome is your objective, establish the occupation first and then the training, not the other way round — and take that advice from a registered migration agent, not from a training provider. We are a TRA-appointed assessor and an RTO; we are not a migration adviser.

A qualification is not an assessment

Worth stating plainly because it is assumed constantly: completing a course does not produce a skills assessment. A TRA assessment is a separate application, assessed against the occupation using evidence of your skills and employment. No course, with us or anywhere, issues one as an outcome.

Verifying this

TRA publishes an RTO Finder covering both the TSS and OSAP programs. It lists the occupations each approved RTO may assess. Any claim of TRA appointment can and should be checked there directly, including this one.

The same discipline applies across the board. An RTO's scope on training.gov.au tells you what it may train and assess. It tells you nothing about a migration appointment, a liquor regulator's approval or a state food authority's list — those are separate registers held by separate bodies. Check the register that actually governs the thing you care about.

Recognition of prior learning

RPL is an entirely different process, conducted by an RTO against units of competency rather than against an occupation.

It is a formal requirement of the 2025 Outcome Standards for RTOs: Standard 1.6 covers recognition of prior learning and Standard 1.7 covers credit transfer. An RTO must offer them.

Credit transfer is close to mechanical: eligible equivalent units can receive credit after verification. Use AQF certification documentation or an authenticated USI transcript as evidence. We verify evidence of equivalent prior completion, check the training-product requirements and any licensing or regulatory restrictions, and document the decision before granting credit. See ASQA’s credit-transfer guidance.

RPL is a genuine assessment. It is not a shortcut and it is not a purchase. You still have to demonstrate competence against the unit's performance evidence — the same evidence a classroom student demonstrates — but you do it from your existing skills rather than by being taught first.

Use the right word when you ask. Requesting "RPL" for a unit you already hold sends you into an assessment you did not need; requesting "credit transfer" for experience you have never had formally assessed will simply be refused for want of a Statement of Attainment. If you are unsure which applies, bring your transcript and let the RTO decide.

The clause that makes RPL possible in the first place

RPL is not a concession the sector grants out of goodwill. It follows from Standard 1.4, which requires every assessment to satisfy four principles of assessment, and one of them does the work:

Flexibility is the RPL clause. "Regardless of how or where they were acquired" is precisely why fifteen years in a kitchen can be assessed against a unit nobody taught you. And validity is why it is still an assessment rather than a paperwork exercise: the unit's practical component does not disappear because the skill was learned at work.

The four rules of evidence apply equally to an RPL judgement: the evidence must be valid, sufficient, authentic — your own work — and current. Currency is the one that catches people out. A skill demonstrated competently in 2009 is not evidence of a current skill, which is why an RPL application usually needs recent work rather than a long career summary.

Two procedural points follow. The assessment tool used for RPL must have been reviewed before use under Standard 1.3, and where a tool is bought in rather than written it must be contextualised to the cohort. And the RPL judgement itself may only be made by a person holding a credential that permits assessment judgements — someone working under direction may gather evidence but may not decide competence. See trainers and assessors.

What RPL actually asks of you

The evidence requirements are the unit's own, and in hospitality several are demanding in ways that are hard to satisfy retrospectively:

So RPL for a practical unit usually needs observation in a real or simulated service environment, not just a reference letter. That is what makes it a genuine assessment rather than a waiver — and it is also why an honest RTO will tell you which units RPL can realistically cover and which will need delivery.

For a large qualification, RPL is worth raising early. SIT40521 Certificate IV in Kitchen Management is thirty-three units with twenty-seven core; an experienced chef may hold many of them in practice.

The limits and the costs, stated plainly

Four things bound both processes, and they are better known before an application than after:

• Credit transfer works on whole units only. A mapping guide showing that you covered part of a unit somewhere else does not support credit transfer; that is an application for recognition instead.
• Credit transfer can be blocked by a licensing or regulatory requirement, not by a provider's preference. Where a licence demands its own current training, a historical unit may not be enough.
• Neither can reach a unit that is not on the RTO's scope of registration. Credit transfer cannot be granted for a unit we do not hold, which is a reason to check the scope before assuming a pathway exists.
• On our own policy, credit transfer attracts no fee to the student and we receive no funding for it, and RPL is not available through government funding — it is available for fee-for-service units. Applications are made before enrolment or at the start of study, using our RPL application form. Confirm the current position directly; no fee is published here.

A worked credit-transfer example

The best case for credit transfer on our scope: seventeen of the twenty core units in SIT30821 Certificate III in Commercial Cookery also appear in SIT40521's core — the thirteen cookery units plus SITHKOP010, SITXINV006, SITXFSA005 and SITXFSA006. Someone holding SIT30821 who progresses to SIT40521 may be eligible for credit transfer for the seventeen shared core units; we confirm the remaining study after reviewing the evidence and the elective plan. That is administrative recognition of identical units, not an assessment. We first verify the evidence and equivalence, check that the units fit your training product, and check for licensing or regulatory restrictions before granting credit. See ASQA’s credit-transfer guidance.

The three that do not carry across are SITHKOP009, SITXHRM007 and SITXWHS005, the last replaced at Certificate IV by the more demanding SITXWHS007.

Supersession is where people get caught

Holding an older qualification code does not always mean holding the current one, and the flag is set qualification by qualification:

Five of our sixteen available qualifications are recorded as equivalent to their predecessor and eleven are not. Where the two are equivalent, the register records equivalent workplace outcomes. This does not automatically replace your certificate or award the newer qualification; we still need to check the requirements and evidence for any credit-transfer or transition decision. Where they are not, expect a credit transfer and RPL assessment rather than an automatic upgrade. Check the register rather than assuming either way — and note that the equivalence flag lives on the qualification's own register record, which is a different endpoint from the RTO's scope of registration.

Where the two processes intersect

For a cook or chef seeking migration, the qualifications that matter are SIT30821 Certificate III in Commercial Cookery and SIT40521 Certificate IV in Kitchen Management.

One caution worth stating: neither of those is CRICOS-registered with us, so neither is available to someone already in Australia on a student visa. The CRICOS-registered culinary route is SIT50422 with culinary electives, which is a management diploma rather than a trade cookery qualification — no cookery unit is core in it.

A migration skills assessment and a student visa enrolment are different pathways with different rules. Establish which one applies to you before choosing a course.

The pre-training review

Separately from either process, every learner enrolling with an RTO completes a pre-training review before enrolment. This is required under Standard 2.2 of the Outcome Standards for RTOs, not a provider preference. Name the instrument when citing it: the National Code 2018 also has a Standard 2.2, and that one is about assessing an overseas student's English and prior study for course entry — a different rule for a different cohort.

It establishes that the qualification is the right one, identifies opportunities for RPL or credit transfer, and determines what support the learner needs. It must consider your language, literacy and numeracy, your digital literacy, and your individual requirements including physical skills, prior experience, prerequisites and entry requirements, and the RTO must be able to produce evidence of each review. It is the natural moment to raise existing experience, and it is consistently under-used — most learners do not know it is the moment to ask.

Bring any Statements of Attainment you already hold and a clear description of what you have done at work. For nationally recognised training, a Unique Student Identifier (USI) is generally required before a qualification or Statement of Attainment can be issued, unless an applicable exemption applies. See the official USI exemption guidance. A USI is free at usi.gov.au. If you already have one, recover it rather than creating another. Your USI must not be printed on your qualification or Statement of Attainment. We verify that it belongs to you before using it.

What arrives at the end

Once a unit or qualification is assessed as complete — whether by delivery, by RPL or by a combination — the documentation rules are the same. Certification must issue within 30 calendar days of the completion of the assessment, provided the training product is complete and all agreed fees are paid, and an RTO must not issue certification to anyone who has not been assessed as meeting the requirements.

A Statement of Attainment carries the issuing organisation's name, registration code and logo, the full title and national code of every unit, the Nationally Recognised Training logo, an authorised signature and a seal or unique identifier. Standard 1.7 requires credit-transfer decisions to be based on evidence of prior completion, such as AQF certification documentation or an authenticated VET transcript. The decision must be documented; those documents are the evidence for the decision. We first verify the evidence and equivalence, check that the units fit your training product, and check for licensing or regulatory restrictions before granting credit.

About us

We are Complete Hospitality Training, RTO 3722, CRICOS provider code 04242E, Level 3, 28 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne VIC 3000, and 410 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010. Contact melbourne@cht.edu.au or +61 3 9654 1554.

We operate under three regulatory regimes: ASQA registration as RTO 3722, CRICOS registration as provider 04242E for three qualifications only — SIT40422 (116358F), SIT50322 (118427D) and SIT50422 (115534C) — and TRA approval for Chef and Cook skills assessments under TSS and OSAP. Our scope of registration carries 17 current qualifications, 81 current skill sets and 579 current units, every component at the extent "deliver and assess".

See about us, all courses, the student toolkit, policies and contact.

We link to the relevant course and regulatory sources in this guide. Check those sources for current requirements, and confirm course availability, delivery, fees and entry requirements with us before enrolling. Equivalence wording clarified on 2 October 2026. We verify evidence and applicable requirements before making credit-transfer decisions; an equivalence mapping is not an automatic award of a newer qualification. ASQA credit-transfer guidance; ASQA training-product changes.