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I'm reading up about Canadian Permanent Residency and it's a bit confusing. There seems to be an "Express Entry" program, where you can apply after 1 year of work experience. But what about other types of visas? E.g. what if you have a regular work permit or another type of visa?

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  • @DipenShah yes, I'm asking about becoming a Permanent Resident if you have a work permit already. Would it be possible to answer this for all the work permit types? I think it would be useful to future readers.
    – JonathanReez
    Jul 19, 2017 at 23:03

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As a general rule, having a Canadian work permit or not having it does not make a difference for some permanent residency programs in Canada like the Express Entry program because it is a Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) and you get points for Age, education, languages proficiency, work experience, etc.. However it makes a whole lot of difference, if you have Canadian experience through a work permit. You can get more points for Canadian education, for having a higher level of language proficiency and/or having more work experience (Canadian/Non-Canadian both count).

Regarding work permits, mainly there are two types of work permits

  • Open Work Permits

These type of work permits include Post Graduation Work permits, International Experience Canada work permits, and other open work permits.

  • Employer-specific work permits

These type of work permits only allow you to work in Canada for a specific employer (The employers's name will be on the work permit so no other employer can hire you). These type of work permits allow employers to hire international talent.

It must be noted that one can apply for permanent residence under any type of work under some or the other criteria.

If you are on a work permit you or your employer can also apply for an Labour Market Impact Assessment which can score extra points in the CRS.

Express Entry program is a new program developed by the government of Canada to address labour shortage in Canada and invite new immigrants based on their skill set. Express Entry targets finishing the processing of an application in under 6 months.

This was all the information I am aware of about the Express Entry program.

Now, there are a lot of Provincial Nominee programs under which you can apply for permanent residence. Some provincial programs are directly connected to Express Entry programs which give you 600 points in the CRS system. For others, you still have to follow the old paper based system. One can find the procedure to do so here.

The requirements of each provincial nominee program differs by each province. Discussing that would make this answer a bit too broad. So I will give a list of all the provincial nominee programs that are available.

One can find more information about the Provincial Nominee Program here

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