PERM Action Plan

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PERM Action Plan

Employer’s Tasks	Dinsmore & Shohl’s Comments
1. Decide on the Job Title	In some situations, PERM labor certification-based permanent resident (Green Card) cases can take one or more years to be finally approved. Therefore, the job title should be one that your organization and the employee can live with over the next few years. A subsequent title change could cause the government to view a job title change to mean a complete job change, possibly requiring your organization to go through the PERM Labor Certification process again.
2. Describe the Job Duties	Please begin by harvesting some Organization-Standard job duties for this type of position. Then, please include in the job duties description more specific information about the environment in which your employee works/will work. For example, in the Programmer Analyst example, the employee was expected to be, “responsible for conversion and interfaces of data from legacy COBOL applications to Oracle applications; data warehouse design and implementation; and development of business applications supporting Oracle application functionality.”
*3. Describe the Minimum Qualifications* Required to Perform This Job**	This is generally the most important component of any Labor Certification application because it creates the measuring stick by which your organization must, in good faith, assess the qualifications of “U.S. worker” job applicants. Please indicate the type of educational degree and the academic majors that are required (for example, BSCS or BSEE). Please indicate the years of required experience and the type of experience that are required and whether the experience must have been in a particular setting, using specific tools, or performing certain functions. Contrary to the job duties which should leave room for some growth, it is important for the employer to be specific here. Please be as precise as possible in describing your legitimate requirements for the position. Please also keep in mind three things: Your employee typically must have earned all of the qualifications that your organization requires BEFORE your employee joined your organization. In other words, to meet your Minimum Requirements, your employee may not generally rely on qualifications gained while working for your organization; Your employee is permitted to use qualifications gained while working at your organization to meet your Minimum Requirements but only if you can prove that the job in which your employee gained the qualifications is not substantially comparable to the job for which PERM approval is being sought. A job that is not substantially comparable means a job requiring performance of the same job duties less than 50% of the time; and the Labor Department requires that an employer filing a PERM application list the organization's actual minimum requirements, rather than the preferred requirements. Therefore, if your organization were to prefer candidates with a Master’s Degree but had sometimes hired candidates with a Bachelor’s Degree, the latter would be the actual Minimum Requirement.
4. Employee to Complete “Qualifications Worksheet”	You will find it easier to craft the skill set (for the position your employee will occupy) by working in tandem with your employee. For example, if you are inclined to require two years of experience, but your employee either has, or can prove, only one and a half years of experience, then requiring two years of experience as part of your Minimum Requirements will serve no helpful purpose.

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