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Offshore yourself: Making the move to Canada

January 7, 2009 nnyq.com edit

If you want to work outside of the United States -- but not too far outside -- next-door Canada offers a liberal immigration policy and plenty of IT jobs.

And Canada is specifically helping IT experts make the move to the Great White North. Many U.S.-based high-tech companies, Microsoft most notably, are leveraging this policy to bring in foreigners to Canada, rather than deal with the far more stringent U.S. H-1B policy. Of course, that may mean you face the same foreign job competitors in Canada as you do in the United States.

[ UseInfoWorld's interactive map to learn about 12 hot cities and 6 regions you should consider for tech jobs abroad. ]

Immigrant workers in one of these seven categories -- senior animation effects editor; embedded systems software designer; MIS software designer; multimedia software developer; software developer services; software products developer, and telecommunications software designer -- do not have to go through Service Canada, Canada’s Immigration and Naturalization agency, to apply for a work permit. Instead, workers can go straight to the Canadian visa office to apply. Under this process, no confirmation letter from the employer's HR department or Skills Development Canada (the country's jobs agency) is necessary to show that the foreign hire isn't taking away a Canadian job.

Obviously, if you want to work for Microsoft, .Net has to be at the top of your skill sets. But open source technologies such as Linux, Apache, and MySQL are very strong in Canada, says Ken Smith, co-founder of Zango, an adware company.

In terms of living in Canada, it is much like the U.S., with slight language differences in the English-speaking parts and a great deal of shared history. Still, Canadians aren't Americans; they're typically more polite and more politically engaged, and they show greater traces of their English, Irish, or French heritages. French Canada is the most different, and although most people there speak English, French is the business and social language outside tourist areas.

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