Canada Blog: From Work Permit To Permanent Residence

I will simply list here links to some useful sites with forums about Canada immigration and work permit abtainment process. If you know some different sites, please, notify me about them.

• http://www.canadaworkpermit.com/ - company provides companies and individuals with solutions for temporary or permanent migration for the purpose of employment and business in Canada. Site has great forum about workers immigration.
• misc.immigration.canada - Very active newsgroup about Canada immigration.
• http://www.immigration.ca/ - Canada immigration layer COLIN R. SINGER. Site has very active forums and some set of articles about immigration.
• http://www.canada-city.ca/ - Site about Canada, Canadian cities and some facts about live in Canada. Site has active immigration forum.
• http://www.russiancanada.com/ - Large portal of Russians in Canada with great forum.
• http://www.canada.ru/ - Russian site about immigration with very active forum.

Last Update: 2006-05-21

This week I have received letter from my prospective employer about some specifics in work permit obtaining process for IT workers. As you can see at Canada Immigration site, IT workers does not need to have job confirmation from HRSDC because for IT workers this confirmation is replaced by letter from employer with job offer and detailed description of position (with NOC code) and salary.

In response to the need of employers to fill critical shortages in the software industry, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) collaborated with Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), Industry Canada and the Software Human Resource Council (SHRC) on the development of a pilot project to streamline the entry of workers whose skills are in high demand in the software industry and whose entry into the Canadian labour market would have no negative impact on Canadian job seekers and workers. Under normal circumstances, a foreign worker who wishes to work in Canada requires an employment authorization from CIC and a validated job offer from a local HRSDC office. If the HRSDC office determines that there are no Canadian citizens or permanent residents available to fill the position, the job offer to the foreign worker is validated and the worker may then apply for an employment authorization for admission to Canada.

Under the pilot project, the job-specific confirmation was replaced by a national confirmation letter which states, among other things, that certain software positions cannot be filled by Canadian citizens or permanent residents. The national confirmation letter removed the delay associated with the job-specific confirmation process.

To qualify for this simplified process, the job being offered must fit within one of specified job descriptions.

For your convenience, you can use following checklist to prepare yourself for applying for Canada Work Permit:

• Work Permit application form with three photographs
• Personal Information Form
• Use of a Representative Form [if applicable]:
• Offer of employment for job in Canada, stating:
  • duration of employment
  • nature of work to be performed
  • salary to be paid in Canada
• Letters of reference from your current and previous employers, including:
  • start and end dates of employment
  • description of nature of work performed
  • job title
• Educational documents related to your IT/ computer studies:
  • including marksheets
  • highlighting computer related courses
• CAQ if destined to Québec

If you want, you can download or read online very detailed guide about Applying for a Work Permit outside Canada by CIC Canada.

In one of my next posts I will say about Ukrainian specifics and how to write letter of reference. So, you can subscribe to RSS-feed of this site and you will get next articles directly from your RSS-reader.

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!