Going to Canada to work via work permit

CLAWS

CLAWS

CLAWS

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Hi Folks,

I'll start by saying that I know very little about this and that I am creating this thread in relation to a conversation the wife and I were having. Any help or advice you guys can give me would be great.

Basically the wife and I just want to go and work abroad for a short period maybe a year or so. At our current places of work we have colleagues who are from New Zealand, Australia or India and they are here on a work permit basis.

How does one go about getting a work permit for Canada? Has anyone here already done this (not necessarily Canada)? What are the things I need to know basically?
 
The CIC (Citizenship and Immigration Canada) is what you need to get a work permit. I did it on a student/young person visa through BUNAC which lasts up to a year although I could only stay for 3 months. Have you been to Canada before? It is a pretty big step moving to a different country that you don't know. I'll probably come back to this later with more information if someone else doesn't supply the necessary in the meantime. :)
 
just wanted to say that ive been to vancouver twice now and its amazing. i want to move there. definitely do this idea if you can!
 
CLAWS said:
Hi Folks,
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You'll have more luck getting a work permit if you have the skills that fall into the "required" jobs category, basically where Canada have a shortage of people internally to fill the roles. As semi-pro said check the CIC pages and also you might find it useful to pop over to the British Expats Forums for some advice. I will be going over in couple of years but through the spousal visa route as my wife is from there :D.
 
We definitely want to do this. Eventually we would like to move there on a permanent basis, but for now we're happy to just go there on a short term basis to learn as much as we can whilst working there.

On the subject of employment, does Canada have some good opportunities when it comes to I.T. ?
 
Canada is in short supply of IT professionals as far as I know, most of them must go to the US :p.

It's something I've looked into a little bit, if you meet the criteria in terms of your profession/skills you can be get a work permit easy enough. What work do you want to do when over there, just something to pay your way or some contracting?
 
As I said, you will struggle unless you have a specific job that cannot really be filled or there is a shortage. In order to get into IT you will need to have some sort of specialist skill that no one over there has. The most common jobs in shortage at the moment are things like Teaching / Police/ Medical and Tradesman (iirc Carpentry and Electrical especially). Unless your company has offices out there and you can see about a secondment (my other route over to support my visa :D:D) It is / can be a long process, some visa waits can be years, so don't get your hopes up too quickly.

EDIT: been a while since I looked at IT roles, Scottland may have more up to date info. Best thing, as said is visit the CIC site or go to one of the Expo Fairs There is one in Leeds and London in November, you can get a lot of info from them.
 
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Origin said:
EDIT: been a while since I looked at IT roles, Scottland may have more up to date info. Best thing, as said is visit the CIC site or go to one of the Expo Fairs There is one in Leeds and London in November, you can get a lot of info from them.
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I did find a list somewhere of specific areas in IT where they are in short supply, although they did also want qualifications to boot. So if you were a .NET developer they wanted degree level qualifications as well as experience.
 
JimpsEd said:
I have been many times. My grandfather lives in Vancouver.
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And it's an awesome place to live and work from what I could see while I was over there, good choice by your granddad.

CLAWS once you're over there you'll need a Social Insurance Number which is rather like our National Insurance Number. Not particularly hard to get but you need an address they can send it to normally. Banks are a bit of a pain in the neck, you'll probably want a 'checking' account and they tend to cost you money every month irrespective of whether you use it or not and the cost takes a hike by the amount of transactions per month often. Oh and the mobile phone system seems even worse, if on PAYG then the cost of the voucher directly relates to how long it lasts, if on contract the phones seemed to be a year or two behind the UK when I went.
 
Morning guys. Just going through some of the websites you provided. A lot of them are talking about immigrating to Canada. What we actually want to do is go there for something like a year and just work there on a work permit basis.

We won't be immigrating there for a good while yet. The idea is that we go there for about a year and we do some contract work, and whilst doing this we get to see Canada and the workings of it and we get to know the country.

Am I on the right track or is what we want to do still come under - immigrating ?
 
semi-pro waster said:
I did it on a student/young person visa through BUNAC which lasts up to a year although I could only stay for 3 months.
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I did this a few years ago for a year. You don't need to be a student to get a visa through BUNAC eaither.

It was much much easier than applying for a VISA the normal way.

I plan to move to Canada in a few years myself and the whole thing of going to work for a year was the same reason as yours CLAWS.
 
We'll probably go on holiday there sometime next year. During that time we'll see what we can find out about coming over on a work permit basis for a year or so.

I really really want to go and I'm dead serious about moving there permanently give or take a few years of course.
 
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