Many of new immigrants are engineers who land in Canada with work experience in their profession. They all come to Canada with a hope to start practicing their profession in Canada. Unfortunately as soon as they arrive they face many difficult issued to be employed by the Canadian employers. In addition to recognition of their degree there are many regulations and licensing requirements imposed by each province. According to the engineering act a person whose profession falls under one of the 3 following categories may not practice without licence:
1- All activities related to designing, constructing, consulting, reporting, monitoring or providing Professional opinion.
2- Activities related to protect life, health, property and public welfare.
3- All activities that require engineering knowledge and regulations except scientists.
If your professions fall under one of the above you are required to be a registered member of the engineering association in the province and practice with licence.
Membership conditions and requirements may change for each province in Canada. In general all provinces have the following requirement similarities to apply for licence:
1- Engineering educations degree (Minimum BA degree)
2- Minimum 48 month of related work experience
3- Pass a professional exam
One of the problems that professional immigrant engineers are facing is the maximum period of accepted foreign work experience by the association is 3 years therefore these immigrants would have to accumulate another year to be qualified to register to write the exam. They generally have difficulties to be hired as engineer in training and gain one more year of experience; because most employers would hire newly graduated engineers directly from universities.
In order to overcome the obstacle there are other avenue such as immigration settlement adaptation program which is designed to help these professional to reach their professional settlement goals in Canada. This program would ease the situation for immigrants to work as a volunteer or for a small salary to work for Canadian employers to gain work experience.
The professional new immigrants through this program may benefit from the followings:
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The Employer may decide to hire after the voluntary work period
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The employer might not proceed with hiring; in this case at least the work experience will be recognized to satisfy the licensing requirements
Due to the above difficulties most new immigrants who have been practicing as an engineer in their countries would prefer to complete an educational degree in Canada in order to gain the chances to be licensed engineer in Canada.
