Canadian Experience Class (CEC)

The CEC is an immigration program of federal Level, for individuals with skilled work experience in Canada. It was developed for temporary foreign workers and foreign graduates who have at least one year of qualifying Canadian work experience.

Entry requirements for CEC

Applicants must meet the following minimum requirements. They must:

  • Have obtained at least one year of skilled, professional or technical work experience in Canada within 36 months of the application date; the work experience must be in the positions that can be classified as Skill Type 0, or Skill Level A and Skill Level B of the Canadian National Occupation Classification (NOC) system;
  • Demonstrate a level of English/French that is not lower than the Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) of 5 ("initial intermediate") or 7 ("adequate intermediate proficiency"), depending on the level of the job.
An applicant must stay and work in Canada legally.

Normally, graduates from a Canadian college or university receive a Post-Graduation Work Permit allowing them to work legally in Canada for up to 3 years. Therefore, they are able to find employment and fulfill the one-year Canadian work experience requirement. That is why the CEC program is most suitable for foreign students.

Express Entry application management system

If you meet the requirements of the CEC program and want to apply for immigration under this program, first you need to get through the application management system Express Entry.

The Express System has its own ranking system that assesses and scores candidates against others. CIC regularly selects the highest-ranking candidates from the pool by inviting them to immigrate to Canada as permanent residents. These rounds of invitations are usually performed twice a month. Those candidates, who were selected and received a Letter of Invitation, can proceed further and submit their application for immigration to CIC.

Submitting documents for immigration

If your application has been selected from the pool of candidates in the Express Entry system, you will receive a Letter of Invitation. This means that you can now submit your application for immigration along with a complete set of documents to immigration authorities for further review.

Currently the selected candidates are given 90 days from the date they receive a Letter of Invitation, for submitting their documents, which is too little. That is why we recommend preparing the required documents in advance, before applying to the Express System, so that by the time you are selected from the pool, you already have most of your documents ready to submit.