Recently, The Australian ran a story quoting Pauline Hanson saying that Australia does not need more “Uber drivers, nail technicians, dog walkers”. Her broader argument was that migration should bring people with skills Australia actually needs, such as doctors, nurses and engineers.

At first glance, that sounds reasonable. But I think there is a problem with the diagnosis.

I am a skilled migrant.

And I drive Uber after work.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that every Uber driver in Australia arrived through skilled migration. Obviously they did not. My point is different: seeing a skilled migrant behind the wheel of an Uber tells you very little about the skills Australia originally brought that person here for.

Australia did not bring me here as an Uber driver.

Australia assessed me as a Corporate General Manager

Before moving to Australia, I had spent much of my career in senior management. I had been CFO of Euroset, which Deloitte ranked as the world’s fastest-growing retailer over the 2002–2007 period.

And later General Manager of Eldorado Mobile, a telecom retail business with around 2,500 employees and close to 500 stores.

When I migrated to Australia, my nominated occupation was Corporate General Manager, ANZSCO 111211.

If you have never been through skilled migration, it is worth understanding what that means. Skilled migration pathways use occupation lists and professional assessments. Applicants do not simply write “General Manager” on a form and receive a visa.

Corporate General Manager was an officially listed skilled occupation, and the Australian Institute of Management was the designated assessing authority at the time. My education and executive experience had to be assessed against the requirements of that occupation before my migration process could proceed.

Collecting the documentation required before the assessment could even begin took me more than six months.

So I arrived with what seemed like a fairly reasonable assumption: Australia had spent considerable effort establishing that my professional experience was real and relevant because that experience had some potential value here.

Then I discovered the Australian experience paradox.

For positions comparable with those I had held before migration, I repeatedly heard: “You don’t have enough Australian experience.”

So I did what many migrants do. I lowered my expectations. I applied one level down, then two, sometimes further.

And then I heard: “You’re overqualified.”

My international experience was real enough to disqualify me from a junior role, but apparently not real enough to qualify me for a senior one.

This is not simply a story from my CV. The Australian Government’s own Migration Review found that the most commonly reported barrier to finding work among skilled migrants after 18 months was insufficient Australian experience, cited by 37.6 per cent. Lack of Australian networks was close behind at 34.6 per cent.

From Chief Marketing Officer to an Optus call centre

Soon after arriving in Australia, I attended a seminar in Adelaide about finding work. There I met a man from India who told me that he had been Chief Marketing Officer of one of the country’s very large telecommunications companies.

Think about the accumulated knowledge behind a position like that. He had worked with an enormous customer base. He had seen marketing programs succeed and fail at scale. He understood customer acquisition, retention, segmentation, pricing and product strategy in one of the largest telecom markets in the world.

Not everything he knew would necessarily work in Australia. Markets differ. Customers differ. Regulation differs. But surely some of that knowledge was worth examining. He encountered almost exactly the same problem I did. At his previous level, he lacked Australian experience. Further down the hierarchy, he was overqualified.

Eventually, he told me, the only job he could find that allowed him to remain in telecommunications was as a frontline operator in an Optus call centre.

There is nothing wrong with working in a call centre. That is not the point.

The economic question is what happened to the knowledge Australia already had inside the country.

Here was someone with C-suite marketing experience from one of the world’s largest telecom markets, working in a role where he had almost no opportunity to influence marketing strategy, customer propositions, pricing or commercial decisions.

His labour was being used. His knowledge largely was not.

The Apple interview

At one point, a career adviser suggested that I radically simplify my CV. If my seniority was preventing me from entering the Australian labour market, the logic was to remove much of the scale and responsibility from my background and make myself look closer to the level of the jobs I was applying for.

I followed that advice when I applied for a retail role with Apple in Adelaide.

There were 16 candidates at the first stage. I progressed to eight, then to the final four.

During one of the final interviews, a senior manager began giving me retail scenarios. An angry customer walks into the store. What would you do? A difficult situation develops inside the team. How would you handle it? Something goes wrong operationally. What happens next?

He kept giving me situations, and I kept explaining how I would deal with them. Eventually, he stopped and said, in effect:

“You keep giving me the right answers. I don’t understand where you know all this from. Nothing in your CV suggests that you should.”

At that point, I told him the truth. A substantial part of my career had been in telecom and mobile retail. I had managed hundreds of mobile-phone stores. My last business in Russia had been connected with mobile-phone repairs, including a distributed network of technicians across multiple cities. I had spent years dealing with customers, teams, incentives, retail operations and commercial decisions.

I explained that if Apple hired me at the salary advertised for the role, it would not simply get somebody capable of doing the job. It would get years of directly relevant experience that I could share with colleagues, use to develop people and apply to problems inside the store.

His response was essentially:

“With your experience, there is really only one position here that would suit you: mine. And mine is already taken.”

I have remembered that conversation for years because it captured the trap almost perfectly. My real experience made me unsuitable for the job. Removing that experience made me suitable only until my competence revealed where it had come from.

The same experience was simultaneously too valuable and not valuable enough.

I used to hire overqualified people deliberately

Perhaps this is one reason the Australian fear of “overqualified” candidates has always puzzled me.

In the European business environments where I worked and hired people, I was often perfectly happy to employ someone who was overqualified for the position.

From a business perspective, I could see plenty of advantages. If two candidates knowingly apply for the same job at the same salary, but one brings substantially more experience, broader judgement and knowledge that can be shared with the team, why should that automatically be a disadvantage?

The more experienced employee may need less supervision. They may recognise problems earlier, make fewer avoidable mistakes, help train colleagues and improve processes that were never mentioned in the job description. They may be able to take ownership of something that would otherwise remain in the manager’s mental workload.

And the company gets all of that at the same salary.

The most common objection is: “But they will leave.”

Perhaps. But do we have a guarantee that the candidate who is not overqualified will remain until retirement?

Modern employees leave jobs for all sorts of reasons. They receive better offers, move interstate, change industries, get promoted, start businesses, have children, dislike a new manager or simply decide they want something different.

There is no lifetime-employment warranty attached to the “appropriately qualified” candidate.

To be fair, employers have not invented the concern completely. A meta-analysis covering 61 studies found a meaningful association between perceived overqualification and both turnover intentions and job-search behaviour. But that literature examines workers broadly. It does not establish that a newly arrived skilled migrant rebuilding a life from scratch will behave exactly like an established local professional who happens to have taken a job below their qualifications. (A meta-analysis of perceived overqualification)

For a recent migrant, wanting a better career and being willing to risk a secure income are two very different things.

A newly arrived family may have limited savings, no property, almost no professional network and little confidence that another job can quickly be found. In some migrant families, one partner initially carries most or all of the household income, sometimes because the other partner is still developing their English.

Losing one job can mean losing the financial security of the entire family.

And even if an overqualified employee eventually leaves, tenure is not the same thing as value.

An employee who stays for two years, becomes productive quickly, prevents expensive mistakes, develops colleagues and improves the operation may create more value than someone who remains for five years and contributes less.

The commercial question should not simply be: “Who will stay longest?”

It should be: “Who will create the greatest value while they are here?”

My own Australian experience certainly does not support treating overqualification as an automatic predictor of short tenure. When I joined my current dealership, there was a Dealer Principal, a Sales Manager and an established team of Sales Executives. Over roughly the following year, every other member of that original sales team left. Some moved elsewhere, one retired, management changed.

I remained.

That proves nothing about the average overqualified migrant. One employee is not a labour-market dataset.

But it does show why overqualified = flight risk is a poor substitute for actually understanding a candidate’s motivation and circumstances.

Migration should import knowledge, not just labour

There is another difference I noticed after moving to Australia.

In the European business environments where I worked, international experience was often considered valuable precisely because it was different.

A manager arriving from another country might have seen a technology, business model, operating process or management practice that the local company had never used. Nobody sensible assumed that an overseas approach was automatically superior. The value was that somebody had seen another way of solving the same problem.

Migration is not only the movement of people. It is also the movement of knowledge, know-how and tested ideas.

Countries do not need to invent every improvement independently. People carry with them things they have already seen work elsewhere.

A friend of mine provides a simple example. He came to Australia from Siberia, where winter temperatures can fall below minus 40 degrees. One of the things that surprised him here was housing. Despite Australia’s much milder winters, he found some homes remarkably cold and was struck by how much less common uPVC window systems seemed compared with the places he knew.

He started selling them. Today he manufactures and installs them himself, although on a relatively small scale.

I am not suggesting that every building practice brought from Northern Europe should immediately be adopted across Australia. His ideas may be right, wrong or require substantial adaptation to Australian conditions.

That is precisely the point.

If the highest position available to someone like him is installer or estimator, his knowledge may never reach the level at which a major building company can even evaluate it. Put someone with international experience into a decision-making role and an idea can be examined, tested, rejected, modified or scaled.

Keep the same person several organisational levels below the decision, and the company may never know the idea exists.

This question matters particularly now. Australia has a persistent productivity problem, and the Productivity Commission has repeatedly stressed the importance of innovation diffusion, the spread of better technologies, ideas and business practices from the frontier through the broader economy. Australia’s labour productivity was still effectively stagnant in the latest 2026 data: Productivity Commission — September 2026 update

I am not suggesting that underutilised migrants explain Australia’s productivity performance. That would be an enormous causal claim with no evidence behind it.

But I do think it is reasonable to ask whether we are overlooking one source of knowledge that is already sitting inside the country.

The engineers are here. The executives are here. The technologists, marketers, manufacturers and operators are here. Some of the know-how, technologies and ideas Australia wants may already be here too.

But if international experience is used only at lower organisational levels, Australia may receive the labour while missing much of the knowledge transfer migration could have delivered.

A company can hire the person without ever importing what the person knows.

It turns out I can sell

My own career after migration illustrates another side of the same problem.

Before coming to Australia, I had never built my career in frontline sales. I did not think selling was one of my strongest professional skills. There were many things I believed I could do considerably better.

Nevertheless, I became one of the strongest performers at Sleepy’s, selling mattresses.

Then I entered automotive sales. During my 13 months at Kia, I have ranked number one in the dealership in several different months. The first time was only about five months after entering the automotive industry.

And I am not competing with a room full of newcomers. Some of the people around me have 15 or 20 years of automotive sales experience. I do not believe I somehow learned more about selling cars in five months than somebody else learned in twenty years.

My results are built on a different foundation: years of leading people, commercial judgement, negotiation, understanding incentives, taking responsibility for outcomes, communicating across levels and learning how very different people make decisions.

Some of those capabilities transfer surprisingly well into sales.

I also drive Uber outside my full-time working hours. At the time of writing, my Uber driver rating is 5.00. (If you use Uber, check the rating of your last driver.)

I mention neither result to claim that I am an extraordinary salesperson or Uber driver - the point is almost the opposite.

Underutilisation does not always look like failure. Sometimes it looks like excellent performance in the wrong role.

A person can adapt extremely well and still be badly underutilised. And I suspect many experienced migrants know exactly what that feels like.

Hammering nails with an iPhone

Imagine taking an iPhone and using it to hammer nails. Could you do it?

Yes.

Hold it in your palm, turn it sideways and strike the nail with the long metal edge. That narrow edge is remarkably strong. With enough practice, you might even become very good at hammering nails with it.

But you are still using only the edge.

The large, bright, full-colour screen is doing nothing. The processor is doing nothing. The cameras, communications technology, software and almost everything else that makes the device valuable contribute nothing to the task.

The fact that an iPhone turns out to be an excellent hammer does not make hammering nails its best use.

I think this is how underemployment feels for many skilled migrants. They may become excellent salespeople, drivers, customer-service employees or administrators. They may perform far better than anyone expected.

But the economy may still be using only a narrow edge of a much larger set of capabilities.

And there is another problem. Keep hammering nails with the phone for long enough and eventually the glass will crack.

Human capital can depreciate too.

Professional networks weaken. Industry knowledge becomes dated. Technologies move on. Executive experience from ten years ago becomes harder to sell than executive experience from last year.

First the economy fails to use the knowledge. Then, gradually, some of that knowledge becomes harder to use at all.

The numbers suggest this is much bigger than a collection of anecdotes

CEDA found that around 23 per cent of surveyed permanent skilled migrants were working below their skill level 12 months after arrival. Around 71 per cent were working either in their nominated occupation or at an equivalent or higher skill level, so the system clearly works reasonably well for many people. But nearly one in four experiencing skills mismatch is hardly a rounding error: CEDA — A good match

A much larger 2024 study by Deloitte Access Economics looked at permanent migrants who had arrived during the previous 15 years. It estimated that 44 per cent were working below the level commensurate with their qualifications, representing more than 621,000 people. Crucially, almost six in ten of those underutilised migrants had entered through the skilled migration stream.

Formal recognition alone does not solve the problem either. ABS data found that among recent migrants who applied to have overseas qualifications recognised, 90 per cent received recognition. Yet among recent migrants who had obtained a job since arrival, only 54 per cent used their highest non-school qualification in their first Australian job. ABS — Characteristics of Recent Migrants

Engineers provide perhaps the clearest example. Engineers Australia reported in 2025 that around 133,000 overseas-born engineers, about 48 per cent of the group, were not working directly in engineering roles, compared with 35 per cent of Australian-born engineers. The same organisation continues to warn about engineering workforce shortages in key sectors. Engineers Australia — Migrant engineers research

This is why simply asking whether a migrant is employed can hide the real issue.

A former Chief Marketing Officer answering calls is employed. An engineer working outside engineering is employed. A Corporate General Manager selling cars is employed. A skilled migrant driving Uber is employed.

The labour is being used. The skills may not be.

And the economic cost is measured in billions

Deloitte Access Economics went further and modelled what would happen if recent permanent migrants were employed at the appropriate skill level at the same rate as Australian-born workers.

Importantly, it did not assume that every one of the 621,000 underutilised migrants could suddenly be placed into a perfect job. The modelling addressed the excess utilisation gap.

Its estimate was around $9 billion in additional economic activity each year, with about $70 billion added to GDP over ten years: Deloitte Access Economics / SSI — Skills mismatch report (PDF)

That makes migrant skills underutilisation more than a personal disappointment.

It is a productivity issue. It is a business issue. It is a knowledge-transfer issue. And it is an Australian economic issue.

So who exactly has failed?

Australia’s migration system is not perfect. Occupation selection can be wrong. Forecasts can be wrong. Qualifications do not always transfer cleanly between countries. Local knowledge matters. English matters. Understanding Australian customers, regulation and workplace culture matters.

International experience does not automatically make somebody the right candidate for an Australian executive role.

And nothing in this article means that every skilled migrant deserves the same position they held before migration. But that is very different from treating international experience as though it has little value until somebody has somehow obtained Australian experience.

In my case, the migration system did what it was designed to do. It identified my nominated occupation, required evidence, subjected my qualifications and management experience to professional assessment and admitted me as a skilled migrant.

Today I work full-time selling cars and also drive Uber around that job to support my family.

If somebody gets into my Uber and concludes that Australia imported an Uber driver, they have misunderstood what happened.

Australia did not import an Uber driver. It imported a Corporate General Manager who ended up driving Uber.

And when engineers, executives, accountants, marketers and other experienced professionals arrive through skilled migration and later work far outside the professions or levels for which they were selected, perhaps blaming immigration officials is too easy.

The more interesting question is what happened after they arrived. Because a country does not benefit from international knowledge simply by issuing a skilled visa. It benefits when that knowledge reaches places where it can influence decisions, improve businesses, transfer know-how and create economic value.

So perhaps instead of asking:

“Why are we importing Uber drivers?”

we should be asking:

“Why are we turning skilled migrants into Uber drivers?”