This overhaul might affect some economic class and temporary foreign worker applicants.
In order to reflect Canada's changing labour market, the NOC is reviewed every year and updated every five years. But significant changes only occur every ten years, making this year publication the most significant upgrade since 2011. The new Statistics Canada was released last September.
The NOC is a tool for provincial governments to manage all worker immigration programs, including temporary ones. All expat workers must meet the NOC eligibility criteria of the program they are applying to. Therefore, expatriates interested in working in Canada must be aware of the current criteria changes.
What are the new criteria for work immigration?
The NOC 2021 will be implemented in fall 2022 in order to have consistency in the implementation process by all the responsible departments in the country. The current criteria, NOC 2016, for immigrant workers in Canada is based on NOC skill levels that fall under four categories: A, B, C, and D or (major, minor and unit groups, respectively). It is categorized based on two major attributes of jobs, the "Broad Occupational Category" and the "Skill Level". These categories are defined according to the type of work performed and with respect to the field of study and the industry of employment—for instance, health occupations or sales and service occupations. The "Skill Level" categorization is primarily defined by the amount and type of education and training usually required to perform a specific occupation but also considers experience, complexity and responsibilities.
Rather than the current approach of categorizing jobs based on skill type, the Canadian government will now categorize jobs based on a new Training, Education, Experience and Responsibilities (TEER) system, the TEER category is based on (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5).
This change was justified by the fact that defining occupations on “skill levels” was confusing, as the old NOC focused on occupation and not skills. Introducing the TEER system will change the sheer towards education and experience required to work in a field. Besides, Statistics Canada points out that the NOC 2016 creates a polarization: low versus high-skilled categorization of jobs. The overhaul for next year is an attempt to get over this tendency and invest in a more accurately capture of the skills required in each occupation.
What are the changes for expats?
The new TEER system has 516 occupations instead of 500 as in the NOC 2016, which means that new occupations were created, mainly in the technological sector: data science, cybersecurity, IT and others.
By Fall 2022, when NOC 2021 will be implemented, foreign professionals interested in working in Canada must ensure their NOC category corresponds with the eligibility criteria of the program they are applying to, and to their experience and studies. For instance, if before expats would search one major area of interest, as before the NOC was described by occupations, now they will have to meet the TEER categories based on their skills.
Skill level A, for example, in NOC 2016 required a university degree (bachelor's, master's or doctorate), but by the next fall of 2022, several years of experience in a specific occupation as police officers, firefighters or in related health will also apply.
According to Statistics Canada, the group B on the last NOC grew disproportionately large over time, as it included occupations that didn't require high degrees of education or a lot of experience. But, for the next year, it is still not known which TEER categories will be eligible for Express Entry-managed programs and also temporary foreign worker applicants. For next year, these and other federal and provincial programs might require a “high skilled” criteria, usually looked for expats from a low economic class.
