Canada Blog: From Work Permit To Permanent Residence

It took a long time before I decided to continue writing about our life in Canada. I wasn’t writing too much because many interesting and (sometimes) disturbing things were happening here, but now it looks like everything is fine again so it is time to tell our story here (see this and other following posts)

So, as you maybe noticed in this post’s subject, I’ve changed my work place. It was quite a painful process because my new employer is a company from the US. Actually, there were many factors which made this process painful and one of them was the fact that we didn’t know (we weren’t sure) that a US company could hire non-canadian citizens who are temporary canadian residents now. At the end we’ve retained really great lawyers (the best immigration lawyer in Canada and one of the best in the world) and they’ve helped us to fill all papers and make it easy to switch to the new employer.

My new employer is Scribd.com - online document publishing company which is in top-500 sites in the Internet now (and growing). My primary duties there as a Scalability Expert are “simple” - our site needs to be able to keep up with growing popularity of the service. I still work remotely from Totonto, company’s head office is located in San Francisco, California.

So, here we are, I’ve started writing new posts again And, to emphasize the major idea of the post I’d like to say it again: if you’re not a canadian citizen, you CAN switch to a new employer even if it is non-canadian company (at least it works for the US companies).

I’m going to apply for PR really soon, and thankt to my employer I’ll apply with 10 points for arranged employment. But as all people on Earth we’re pretty lazy and don’t like an idea of waiting few months for HRSDC confirmation letter… Today I called to CIC hotline and asked them how can we apply w/o this letter and they said, that if I have a valid work permit now, I can apply with photocopy of my WP attached now and then, when I’ll get new WP, I can send its photocopy to them. So, I don’t need to have a WP valid for at least one year from application date as mentioned in official docs.

Tomorrow I’m going to review all my paper ready for application and will describe this process thoroughly here. Stay tuned

After I have started my primary blog (Homo-Adminus Blog), almost every week I am receiving different job offers. Some of them are not so interesting for me, but about two weeks ago I have got very attractive offer from small Canadian company, which works with interesting Web 2.0 projects. This company offered me relocation to Canada and as for now I am going to accept their offer because I was my dream - to move to Canada one day.

Last week I have made some steps to prepare application for Canadian work permit and, as I think, process of obtaining work permit is complicated and there is not so many information sources about some aspects of this process. So I decided to start some type of bloging site about my way of relocation to Canada.

In this blog I will post links to all of interesting resources about Canada, all important information about my relocation process and many other things related to this topic. There are will be posts about Ukrainian specifics of process and general questions about IT worker relocation… So, If you are going to move to Canada, this blog may be interesting for you. If you are already moved to Canada, you can leave your comments about how you have passed all steps that will be described there. And even if you are not going to leave your current home, this blog bay be interesting for you as some “traveler’s notices” journal ;-).

Almost as in my tech blog I will post here in two languages (English and Russian), but sometimes my posts will be only in English because of my laziness or because lack of free time at that moment to create good translations (all my posts are created in English first and then translated to Russian).

As always, you are welcome to leave comments to all of my posts and I will try to answer to all of them. See you next time at my blog!