The Employment Gold Card Super-Thread

Thanks @fifieldt for getting back to me! That was my assumption too. I did write a cover letter anyway (I couldn’t tell if that was essential, but figured it wouldn’t hurt), so I guess I’ll upload that there.
I did also e-mail Mr. Yang and Ms. Ho of the Ministry of Interior (on the basis of your blog post, it seems, which was also very helpful!) late last night to ask the same question. The former replied very quickly this morning to direct me to Ms. Wang of the Ministry of Science and Technology and send the list of required documents (which I already had).
So I guess I’ll just upload the cover letter in the meantime unless she gets back to me to tell me otherwise. :slight_smile:

Just as a follow up to my previous question, they got back to me to confirm that this was indeed a website error and would be fixed soon. I submitted a cover letter there anyway. :slight_smile:

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Hello again everyone,

  • Do you confirm that EACH single, uploaded pdf files should be < 1 MB?
  • If so, which compressor have you used? Using free, online compressor the quality is significantly lost…
  • Separately, do you know if they have a capped number of cards per defined period? If so, would it be easier / less competitive to get granted a 1 year GoldCard instead of a 3 years? Which incentive an applicant would have to apply to a 1 year GoldCard instead of 3 years?

Thank you and good luck to all the applicants,
Matteo

Confirmed. It’s terrible. I spent a lot of time trying to compress files. When I applied PDFs were not allowed (only images) and the size limit was even lower. If your PDF is largely an image you may be better to convert it into JPG. If you need help compressing files I might be able to help with the tools I used (Linux command line stuff) - let me know.

Currently, I believe they want as many qualified gold card holders as possible.

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Hi @fifieldt,

Thank you so much! By using your Linux command line tools…how much would you be able to reduce a 6MB pdf?

Thank you

Would need to see it and try - send me a PM. 6MB is a lot though - is it multiple pages? If so, probably the solution would be to split it into multiple files.

If it’s really not possible to compress or split, I believe the official contacts may be happy to work with you to receive the files some other way.

They won’t accept sharing links from cloud storage?
Or emails with attachments?
What year is this? :roll_eyes:

@fifieldt Thank you Tom!

I’ve worked it out using Ghostscript from cmd…but yes good point ! Just splitting the files properly would do I guess.

M

All went through last month. They asked me why I only have income in one month per year (because I was taking out the minimum in the UK, £11,850 at the time) and that is way over the threshold, but I needed to write them a letter and attach it about why I only have been taxed just for that one month. I explained it was for tax reasons, not wanting to lie, and after that they tanked for like 1.5 months without any response and then I got a response to send off my passport. Picked up my gold card this week!

I thought I was going to have issues proving my expertise as they mentioned they don’t accept links. But in the end they didn’t ask anymore.

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@emmep It’s actually worse than that. When I did it last week, the actual limit for PDFs was <512 kB (or thereabouts, maybe <500 kB or <520 kB). It does say < 1 MB at the top of the form, but uploading the PDFs I’d compressed to below that limit threw up errors saying the file size should actually be as above.

I used a combination of Adobe Acrobat and a PDF compressor* to compress each PDF and/or split them up into multiple files for uploading separately where possible. It did take a bit of experimentation to play around with the parameters while maintaining half-decent quality, but I figured this is a problem caused by their file size limit and they would just have to ask for better quality files if they needed them.

*I used https://tools.pdf24.org/en/compress-pdf, but others can be found online.

How did they know about that? Were you applying on the basis of the income threshold, or on your expertise and they just asked for that anyway?

1.5 months? ouch. I’ve been in limbo for about two weeks while it’s under review, was naively expecting a reply for better or worse any day now. Guess I need to hunker down. Thanks for the update!

Thank you @Andrew. Will try.

I think it’s crazy in 2020 to not accept zipped files. It would make so much more sense to just zip everything together and upload.

Thank you,
M

The card is finally in hand, so I can finally breath easy. Thank you to all for your help, especially @fifieldt!

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congratulations, and welcome to the club :slight_smile:

zip files are a security risk from their perspective, you could put a malicious code in the file or a Trojan horse.

i think many things are crazy here, not sure if this is one of them

I am curious who here who has received the card is married to a non-local? I know that your spouse gets an ARC, but do they also get the open work permit? I remember reading this before, but can’t quite remember where.

I am married to a non-local and got a Gold Card.

Did your spouse get a residence visa and an open work permit?

I believe they get arc, but not work permit. spouse needs to find a job that will sponsor her.
kids get arc till the age of 18 I believe, then they need to leave taiwan or find a legal way to stay (e.g. student visa)