For an Irish citizen within its age range, New Zealand's working holiday visa is a first step that needs no job offer: it allows temporary work, though not a permanent job. The Irish visa's only extension, the Working Holiday Extension Work Visa, requires time spent planting, tending, harvesting or packing crops for fruit, vegetable or grape growers. Staying on as a skilled worker takes a job with an employer that Immigration New Zealand (INZ) has accredited: the Accredited Employer Work Visa ties you to that job and can lead to residence, for example through the Skilled Migrant Category, which awards points for a qualification, pay or New Zealand occupational registration.

Getting a police certificate from the Garda, Ireland's police, takes planning. For Ireland, INZ asks you to write to the Garda superintendent for your district, listing every Irish address you have had with dates, the reason and the destination country, and enclosing a link to INZ's police certificate page as proof that the visa needs one. An Irish citizen who never lived in Ireland instead requests a copy of any Garda records through a data protection access request. For the Skilled Migrant Category later, an Irish degree on INZ's exemption list needs no assessment by NZQA, New Zealand's qualifications authority, unless INZ asks; the list excludes study at an overseas campus and Trinity College Dublin's Master of Arts.

If you also hold British citizenship, the mistake to avoid is applying under the Irish scheme without first comparing the British one. New Zealand grants each person only one working holiday visa, under any scheme and even if it goes unused, so taking the Irish visa closes the British scheme for good. The British scheme has its own age range and lengths of stay, a Subsequent Work Visa to extend a shorter stay, and a requirement to normally live in the United Kingdom, Jersey, Guernsey or the Isle of Man, so read both INZ pages first.