Food talent a hot commodity for immigration in 2015

Computing, academic and financial experts were also in top ranks of invitees

Canada’s new economic immigration selection system has lived up to its “just-in-time” billing by processing most applications from start to finish within the government’s target of six months.

According to the one-year report card on the Express Entry system, 80 per cent of cases were processed within that time frame — from the day a complete application was received until a final decision was made by an immigration officer.

“Over 31,000 invitations to apply to permanent residence have been issued to a diverse range of highly skilled immigrants and almost 10,000 individuals (principal applicants and their family) have already landed in Canada as permanent residents,” said the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada review.

“Key findings indicate that professors were in the top 10 occupations list and that many international students fare well in Express Entry.”

Some 2,356 applicants invited to immigrate last year were “food service supervisors,” followed by 2,295 cooks. Together the two occupations accounted for 16 per cent of those who got a pass for permanent resi- dent status in Canada. Information systems analysts, software engineers, computer programmers and interactive media developers, university professors, retail sales supervisors, graphic designers and illustrators, financial auditors and accountants, and financial investment analysts rounded up the top ten.

Under the Express Entry system, implemented in January 2015, each applicant completes a profile that is then added to a pool of candidates, where they are ranked against one another based on points awarded for personal attributes such as education, language skills and work experience. A positive labour market impact assessment — a government certification that shows a candidate’s skills are in short supply in Canada — automatically boosts an applicant’s score by 600 points.

There were a total of 23 draws, each with a different cutoff ranging from a low of 450 points to a high of 886. As of this January, there were 60,042 profiles in the pool, with 22.5 per cent of them having a score between 400 and 449, and 36.4 per cent of a score between 350 and 399.

In 2015, 191,279 profiles were created in the pool, but 88,048 of them were removed because the applicant did not meet the criteria for any of the four economic immigration classes: provincial nominees, federal skilled workers, federal skilled trades and Canadian experience class.