yesterday i talked with a guy who runs an agency that facilitates brazilian people's entry into québec, and he suggested enrolling in a college to get a DEC or DEP as a starting poing to getting the work experience required to become a permanent resident. that possibility had crossed my mind but i was close to dismissing it due to costs and time commitment, but he was quite convincing in making it sound like the option most likely to succeed (and it's his company's job to mediate all the paperwork, so of course he wanted to sell that option).
the closed work permit route requires an existing job offer; the open work permit route requires a job offer from an employer that has an LMIA (which is next to impossible currently and in the MTL area); and the regular skilled worker program requires a high score which mainly comes from work experience, which i don't have.
so the study permit route is beginning to sound promising. it would definitely cost a lot of money, but i have realised it's not an unattainable amount for me. the other concern i had is time: a technique program (DEC) is 3 years long, because it's an alternative to university, it's also expensive and has a bunch of general formation classes like philosophy and english and literature.
the other option is vocational training (DEP). they're usually 1800 hours/16 or 18 months long, a bit less expensive than techniques, and seem to have a decent chance of employment. so i looked at some courses and the trade i found myself most charmed by is welding assembly.
i legit stayed up until almost 4 am last night falling in this rabbit hole. both my partner and my mom seemed surprised that i would be interested in a kind of manual labour, but my mom always enjoyed stuff like that and seemed quite supportive. i understand it's a physical, sweaty job and i'm not in the best shape, and i have more experience working with computers than my hands. but i feel simply enchanted by the idea of learning it. i remember one time i was at my mom's uncle's house and we had fun trying out his soldering machine (which is welding adjacent i guess).
like, my university career started in materials engineering, an offshoot of the metallurgical engineering course. i picked materials because it was broader and had more chemistry in it, and i still like anything to do with materials, but i always liked metals the most. then i went into chemistry and felt sad that we rarely work with materials and solid state, and sometimes sigh and wish i could have finished the engineering degree. that's all to say being interesting in the welding trade is not completely out of character for me!
plus, my skills in chemistry labs are likely transferrable. organisation from planning experiments, patience from waiting for results, motor skills from all the titrations and pipetting and measuring mass, etc. i really think this could work.
yet two concerns arise from this path. one is the pay, which i'm sure is not great for a fresh graduate. i also don't know what the whole deal is with apprentices and journeymans, but i saw that if you're a journeyman it's a not insignificant about 64k/year salary, and there are tons of career options and employment seems good.
the other is, unfortunately, sexism. i felt good seeing a lot of women in all those videos of schools showcasing their soudage-montage DEP programs, but the reality is that it is a male-dominated field. look at any video on YT with female welders and chances are the comments are full of sexist remarks. even on reddit, people are likely to say "i don't care if you're female, male, gay, white, black, or orange with blue spots, i care that you do your job", which just feels icky somehow. as an afab who's not thick-skinned, i worry i'd be treated harshly or unfairly, even if personally i usually get along with men.
but anyway, that's where my immigration project is at the moment. i'm feeling more confident that the study route may be the best one. i didn't expect to spend my week off researching this, but i'm sort of glad i did.
prguitarman
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