Former international students choose to stay longer in Canada after their studies for different reasons.
Some find the country’s level of safety better than in their home countries.
Others are attracted to a multicultural environment where they feel more welcome than in a lot of many other places in the world.
Good quality of education and better employment opportunities are also big factors.
Whether they take advantage of the Canadian Experience Class immigration stream (CEC) and stay in Canada with or without an aim to immigrate permanently, working in Canada after graduation can be useful.
They gain Canadian work experience that they can use to land a permanent job in the country and become permanent residents if they wish to immigrate.
They can also use the working experience they gain in Canada to land good jobs back home when they decide to go back, or in any other countries where they may end up going.
That work experience includes a better knowledge of English or French, experience with professional organisations and companies, and international work experience in general.
Renee Wei, a 2011 graduate of Carleton University’s Master of Journalism program, wants to do journalism in “a more free world”: Canada. She doesn’t think she would find as much freedom to do her journalistic work in her home China as Canada provides.
“I am a journalist, I want to report true stories,” she said. “I had a test of what it is like to work as a reporter in China – which is not very free – there can be a lot of repercussions if you report the wrong story, which is very easy to do.”
A work permit that she obtained right after graduation helped her to find a job in Toronto with Business News Network (BNN) television.
She got her work permit under the Post-Graduation Work Permit Program (PGWPP), and she is potentially eligible to apply for permanent immigration through the CEC.
She also said she had an option to immigrate through the Provincial Nominee Program.
It took Renee Wei a one-year exchange in Hong Kong to decide that she needed more exposure to the Western culture. She then decided to come to Canada for her education and improve on her existing skills in broadcast journalism.
Canada’s immigration policies enticed her to stay in the country after her graduation even if she had heard about them before and had considered staying in Canada an option before going there for school, she said.
“Having a work permit helped a lot,” she said.
She described the process of acquiring a work permit after her graduation as easy since all she did was to submit the required documents online.
For Ugandan citizen Sylvia Isoke, now a marketing consultant in Ottawa for the transportation consulting firm CPCS, working in Canada after graduation was an opportunity she didn’t want to miss. She has always wanted to have international work experience, she said.
http://youtu.be/lk8eEHaLb4g
“It was a much easier process than the U.S. where I had been before. It was a much clear-cut path and time wise it was feasible,” she said about the open post-graduation work permit. “It was an opportunity that you didn’t have that pressure to find a particular job, that pressure was sort of relieved with the flexible system.”
A graduate of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA) at Carleton University, she hadn’t initially chosen to study in Canada for its immigration policies, but opted to stay on once she learned about the CEC.
She preferred Ottawa because her study program was “much cheaper” in comparison to schools in the U.S. where she had done her undergrad studies.
Then she started hearing about the possibility of staying in Canada after graduation when she was in school in Ottawa.
“That’s what convinced me to stay,” she said.
Isoke is waiting to receive her Permanent Resident permit, which she applied for through the Canadian Experience Class.
Apart from the language requirement that she called “redundant” in her case since she considers her English knowledge sound enough as a graduate of an Anglophone program at NPSIA, she said the rest of the process to apply for Permanent Residence was clear.
With the work experience she will acquire at CPCS, she will be prepared to either stay in Canada or move to other countries, she said.
She wouldn’t especially hesitate to go back home if she doesn’t get admitted into Canada as a permanent resident because her work experience would serve her as well in Uganda, she said.
“There is always plan B,” she said with a laugh.
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Read more:
Canada’s reliance on immigration for population and workforce growth
Related Links:
Enacting the Canadian Experience Class immigration stream (Canada Gazette)
Statistics Canada’s Population Projections (2009 to 2036)
A ten-year outlook for the Canadian labour market (2006-2015)