Working in Canada Without Studying There: 6 Routes, ft. Jamie

Updated 2026/10/16

How can Taiwanese work in Canada without studying there?

You don’t have to study abroad to work in Canada. The most common route is to get an offer from a Canadian employer first. The employer applies for an LMIA as required (tech roles can go through the Global Talent Stream) or confirms the role is LMIA-exempt, and you then apply for an employer-specific work permit, which only lets you work for that employer. Taiwanese aged 18 to 35 can also apply for an IEC Working Holiday, which doesn’t require an offer. Once you have Canadian work experience, you can look into applying for permanent residence through Express Entry.

Below are the 6 routes Taiwanese most often use. All conditions follow the Government of Canada website (canada.ca); check the site for the latest rules before you apply:

Route	Who it suits	Offer needed first?	Key official points
Employer-specific work permit (most need an LMIA)	People who already have an offer from a Canadian employer	Yes	An LMIA is a document showing the employer needs a foreign worker to fill the job. Once the employer gets a positive LMIA, it gives you the LMIA letter and Annex A to include with your work permit application (IRCC guide, who needs an LMIA).
Global Talent Stream (GTS)	Highly skilled roles such as software engineers, data scientists and cybersecurity specialists	Yes	The employer applies; it is a type of LMIA. The Category B list includes software engineers and designers (NOC 21231), and the LMIA processing fee is CAD 1,000 per position (GTS requirements). The official service standard is 10 business days for the LMIA and 2 weeks for the work permit, with about 80% of cases processed within each standard (GTS overview).
IEC Working Holiday	Taiwanese aged 18 to 35 (inclusive)	No	Up to 12 months. You need at least CAD 2,500 to cover your expenses in Canada and health insurance for your entire stay. Taiwanese can take part in IEC only once in their lifetime, in any category (IEC eligibility by country).
IEC Young Professionals	Taiwanese aged 18 to 35 (inclusive); 18 to 30 for applicants through the Taiwan Global Pathfinder Initiative	Yes, and it must relate to your profession	Up to 12 months. You need a signed offer or employment contract before you submit your profile to the pool, and the same minimum of CAD 2,500 (IEC eligibility by country).
Intra-company transfer	People working at an overseas office of a multinational	Your company transfers you	Within the 3 years before applying, you must have worked continuously for at least 1 year for the same company outside Canada; you must be transferring into an executive, senior managerial or specialized knowledge role; and the two companies must have a qualifying relationship. If you qualify, you can apply for an LMIA-exempt employer-specific work permit (IRCC guide).
Express Entry (permanent residence)	People with skilled work experience who want to immigrate	No (an offer earns extra points)	Canadian Experience Class: 1 year of Canadian work experience (TEER 0–3) within the past 3 years. Federal Skilled Worker: 1 year of continuous work in your primary occupation within the past 10 years, which can be overseas experience, plus language at CLB 7 (Express Entry eligibility).

IEC quotas and opening dates change every year, so this article doesn’t list numbers. Go by the official announcements.

Where to find jobs in Canada

Job Bank, the Canadian government’s job site, has a page written for job seekers outside Canada. It suggests first checking whether you can get a work permit, then applying only to jobs that are “recruiting international candidates”, which are marked with an icon (Job Bank guide for foreign candidates).

Jamie applied to a huge number of jobs on LinkedIn and went to every interview she got. She also recommends building a network on LinkedIn to get referrals, which she thinks gives you the best odds. You can pull keywords from the descriptions of similar jobs on LinkedIn.

Jamie’s actual path

This covers only what Jamie said on the show:

• She worked in Taiwan for about three years before leaving, at a big Taiwanese tech company, a startup and the Taiwan office of an American company, and she also had an offer from Amazon (AWS) in Taiwan.
• She didn’t study in Canada. She applied through LinkedIn from Taiwan and got an offer from a Canadian software company through interviews.
• She moved to Canada in 2021, says she immigrated a year later, and at the time of the interview was a software engineer in Toronto.
• She thinks the visa is the hardest part of job hunting abroad, since it depends on whether the company will sponsor you. She also mentioned the working holiday as one visa you can get without studying there.

Compared with the table above, Jamie took the “get an offer from a Canadian employer, then the work permit” route and applied to immigrate later. She didn’t say on the show which kind of work permit she held or which immigration program she used, so this article doesn’t assign her to a specific one.

This article is a condensed transcript of the podcast. Click here 👉🏻 to listen to the full episode (in Chinese).

If you enjoyed it, please give my podcast a five-star rating on your platform 🌟 (transcripts take a lot of work 🥹)!

---

Hi, and welcome to “Jason’s Career Folder”. I’m your host, Jason. I’ve been sharing career and study-abroad content for a long time. Here you can “open” the folder and explore stories, and you can also “edit” it with me: build your experience, pick up insights and learn new things!

🎤 Guest: Jamie in Canada 🍁
Instagram | @jamieinca
Medium | jamieinca

---

In this episode:

📂 Landing a Canadian job offer while still in Taiwan
📂 Which jobs in Canada are easier for Taiwanese to get?
📂 Taiwan vs. Canada: work and living conditions
📂 Experience across large, mid-size and small companies, Taiwanese and foreign firms, and startups (a big tech company, a startup, a US company, AWS Taiwan)
📂 Five jobs in three years after graduating: why?
📂 Switching into software engineering
📂 How to be a good PM in tech
📂 What should engineers watch for when job hunting? How do you show your skills on a resume or in interviews?
📂 Advice for university students, international students and listeners planning to work abroad…

Job hunting in Canada: getting a Canadian offer from Taiwan

J: I’m really happy to have Jamie here today. She found a job in Canada while she was still in Taiwan, and she’s going to tell us how she did it without studying abroad. Jamie, could you start by introducing yourself?

Hello to all the listeners of Jason’s Career Folder. I’m Jamie, and I’m happy Jason invited me to share some of my work experience in Taiwan and abroad. I’m now a software engineer in Toronto, Canada. I have about five years of experience in total, including about three years of work in Taiwan before I came to Canada.

For three years after graduating I burned the candle at both ends: work during the day, English study at night, and software engineering skills on the weekends. In that time I got offers from a big Taiwanese tech company, the Taiwan office of an American company (the largest medical technology group in the US), Amazon in Taiwan and a Canadian software company. Because I had always dreamed of moving to Canada, I gave up a well-paid Amazon engineering job that many people would kill for, and in 2021 I arrived in the land of the maple leaf. I saved the millions it would have cost to study abroad, and a year later I immigrated to Canada, with the least time spent possible!

J: I’m so glad Jamie agreed to this interview. I first came across her on Instagram a few months ago and asked her some questions about being a PM in tech. She answered me very kindly, so today I wanted to invite her onto the podcast to talk in depth about her unusual path: before turning 30, she immigrated to Canada without ever studying there!

How do you apply for jobs in Canada from Taiwan?

J: Jamie, how did you land a job in Canada while you were still in Taiwan, without studying abroad or getting picked for a working holiday visa?

It was really simple. I opened LinkedIn and started applying like crazy! When I got an interview, I did the interview, and when one worked out, I just moved here. I think that’s pretty much the path everyone takes when job hunting.

Do Canadian companies hire applicants from overseas?

J: Why would Canadian companies accept resumes from Taiwan?

Canada is a country of immigrants, and local employers are very used to working with people from all over the world, so the fact that we’re foreign applicants doesn’t bother them. Everyone is a foreigner. What matters is the visa and whether your skillset fits the role! Quantify your contributions from past jobs, make your profile look professional, and apply widely on job platforms so you get more interviews despite the disadvantage of not having a visa, since you’ll get screened out more often. I also recommend using LinkedIn to build your network and get referrals (your best odds).

What’s very different about Canada is that there are so many immigrants here that people are completely used to working with colleagues from every country. When they hire, they don’t feel they have to find a local, because there really are a lot of foreigners here. Everyone is an immigrant.

The main thing they look at is probably whether the company is willing to sponsor a visa. If you’re a foreigner but you studied here, you get a post-graduation work permit, so the company doesn’t have to pay extra to sponsor you. As long as your skill set matches what they’re looking for and you do fine in the interviews, being a foreigner isn’t much of a barrier. The visa is the main difficulty.

Which jobs in Canada are easier for Taiwanese to get?

J: Which jobs in Canada are easier for Taiwanese to land?

Non-technical roles like sales and marketing, where being a smooth talker wins, require a good understanding of the local culture. For those of us who aren’t native English speakers and are used to Asian ways of working, standing out among locals in those roles is hard and takes time. Technical jobs are easier by comparison. The skills (for example, the CS techniques and tools an SWE needs) came out of North America in the first place, so you don’t need a long adjustment period and can be productive quickly!

As for which jobs are easier for Taiwanese to get, I’d split them into two groups: technical and non-technical. Technical means something like engineering. Non-technical means management-type roles like PM, or consultant, or sales.

Personally, I think technical roles are easier for Taiwanese because they don’t demand exceptional communication skills. Communication still matters, of course, but it’s mostly teamwork inside your team. In a non-technical role like business development or sales, you basically talk for a living. You have to persuade customers to work with you, so communication becomes the core skill your job depends on.

Software engineering isn’t like that. Our job is mostly writing code and building products, and communication mostly happens within the team. So I think technical roles are relatively easier for Taiwanese.

How to prepare for software engineering interviews in Canada

J: If you want to land a Canadian offer while still in Taiwan, what skills can you prepare in advance?

For software engineers, the skills are pretty much universal. The skills are what they are. The only thing that varies is that each company picks its own tech stack, which may not match the tools and languages you use. So the first part of preparing is to pick up as many languages and tools as you can. You don’t have to master them, but you should have at least a basic understanding.

Next is interview prep. For software engineers there are two kinds of interviews. The technical ones are coding interviews, so you grind LeetCode. The non-technical ones are a pile of behavioural questions, where you give a complete answer based on your past experience. I explain this in detail in a post on my own blog, “How to improve your English effectively (in Chinese)“. The short version: answer using STAR as much as you can, and in the R (result) part, quantify your impact wherever possible!

For example, if you optimized a service, the result might be that performance went up by some percentage, or that you saved a certain amount of resources.

SWE skills are universal, and the main tech stacks people build with are just a handful. You don’t need to master all of them; it’s enough to know the popular ones everyone uses, e.g. React, Typescript, Java/ Python, Docker, AWS/GCP, etc.

1. Tech Round

• Coding: practice “saying” your thinking and approach out loud as you solve LeetCode problems
• System Design: you have freedom here, but the design has to make sense and meet the requirements of the problem

2. Behavioural Round

STAR, plus numbers that quantify your contributions in past jobs

How do you quantify results on a resume?

J: A question I get a lot is about using STAR on a resume or in interviews. People often don’t know how to quantify the result. Say I optimized some code, but I don’t know how to monitor the effect afterwards. How do you go about expressing results in numbers?

It really depends on what you worked on. Take the example from before, where you improved a service’s performance. Before you start, check how long the service takes from start to finish and how many resources it uses, for example how much memory.

Then, after you optimize it, measure again, and the difference tells you roughly how much performance improved. I know a lot of people in Taiwan don’t do this. I didn’t either when I was there; we just didn’t think it mattered much. But when people abroad read a resume, they really look at what the IMPACT of your work was. If you don’t write it down, how are they supposed to know what your work actually helped with, right?

When you write your resume, read it from the reader’s side. Whatever you do, don’t include a photo! Keep it to two pages at most. Many companies now run resumes through an AI system that searches for keywords, so keywords matter a lot; look up the keywords for relevant roles on LinkedIn. For behavioural questions, I suggest keeping a set of Q&A notes for behavioural interviews, with your past work experience written out in STAR format and quantified, so you can review it quickly before an interview (or keep it open next to you during the call)!

So my advice is this: starting now, for every project you work on, check the current state of a service before you optimize it, then check again when you’re done. That lets you roughly calculate the difference your work made, before and after. If you don’t do this, you really won’t know, and in the end all you can do is make something up.

Working in Taiwan’s tech industry and switching into software engineering

Jamie’s work experience in Taiwan is quite broad. She has been at many kinds of companies: large, mid-size and small Taiwanese firms, foreign companies and startups (a big Taiwanese tech company, a startup, the Taiwan office of an American company, and AWS Taiwan).

Is changing jobs often OK for engineers? Why she had five jobs in three years

J: Jamie, you wrote in one of your posts that you changed jobs five times in the three years after graduating. I’m curious: why did you want to switch so often?

I think it depends on the profession. Some of my friends are nurses, and their career plan is to avoid changing hospitals too much, because if you switch, your seniority starts over. But software engineering is different. Technology keeps updating, and languages and tools iterate fast. If you stay at one company on the same project for too long, you have very little chance to touch anything new, unless you explore new tools and technologies on your own after work. Even then, exploring is one thing, and actually implementing it on a project is another.

If you want to get to that point, where you apply the new technology you’ve learned on a real project and have that experience, changing jobs is really the only way, because your current team’s project can’t swap out its whole tech stack. Personally, I usually stay at a company until I feel I’ve learned most of what I can there. If I can’t see how I’d keep growing by staying, I start looking for the next job.

When I look for a job, I’m not that focused on salary. I mainly look at what the company’s projects are, what their tech stack is, and whether there’s something I’m interested in learning.

An MIS graduate who couldn’t code: how she switched to software engineering

J: Jamie has said she studied Information Management in college and Healthcare Management in grad school, but because she skipped class so often and graduated near the bottom of her class both times, she never seriously learned any programming. Without a technical background, how did she “quickly build up backend skills on the side while working”, and eventually even land an offer from AWS (with an acceptance rate of about 2%)?

A lot of people think switching into coding means changing fields, and I guess I sort of studied a related major, but Information Management isn’t really that related. It’s half management classes and half coding classes, and we honestly weren’t good at programming. When I graduated I couldn’t even write hello world. I really started from scratch, because I never paid attention in class. After graduating I was at zero. I’m actually quite grateful to my first job, because even though I couldn’t write code at all when I graduated, my first job out of school was as a software engineer. That’s a story for another time.

Before the interview I just memorized everything, pure rote memorization, and got through it. Since my first job was as a software engineer, I learned a lot of the technical side on the job. This may not be nice to say, but I think the culture at that big Taiwanese tech manufacturer was pretty toxic. I don’t know about other teams, but on our team one developer was usually juggling several different projects at once. Normally a company’s development team doesn’t do that. If you’re front end, you focus on front end, and if you’re on project A, they don’t pull you onto project B or C to do something else. But at my peak there I was handling five different projects alone, and all five had different tech stacks: some used Java, some Python, some Scala, all different. I think I learned a lot through that work.

Without a technical background, the early stage is going to be painful. Every software engineer goes through it, and it’s a field where the learning never ends. So if you love learning new things and enjoy the feeling of getting through a challenge, You’ll find so much joy in this field.

“You don’t need to be an expert in any specific technical field,
but you do have to be an expert in learning and problem-solving.”

The first thing I got was the technical skills. The second, and a very important one, was “learning” itself: how to learn new things. To be a software engineer you don’t have to master every technology, but you have to be very good at “learning”. After work, when I see a new technology or tool, I usually go read the tool’s official documentation, and that lets me understand fairly quickly what it does and how to implement it.

Where should you start if you have no coding background?

With zero background it can be pretty hard. My suggestion would be to start with an online course or a bootcamp, because if you have no experience at all, you don’t even know how to look for resources, and that makes everything much harder. In an online course or a bootcamp, they guide you when you get stuck and show you how to do problem solving. They teach you that skill, and I think it’s an important one.

Once you have some experience and want to learn a new tool, the official documentation is the clearest source, since it’s written by the people who make it. There’s also plenty on YouTube and Google. Search a keyword and you get a whole series of tutorial videos.

Preparing to job hunt abroad: PM work, resumes, interviews and English

How technical does a PM in tech need to be?

J: Since Jamie is an engineer, I wanted to ask from an engineer’s point of view: what skills or knowledge do you need to be a great PM in tech?

A PM is the bridge between inside and outside, and has to clearly explain the friction that comes from people knowing different things. A PM in tech doesn’t need to be very technical. Their core value is understanding engineers, many of whom aren’t good at explaining problems and needs in plain language, and helping get that across to stakeholders. So you need to know some technical terminology and have a fundamental understanding. I think the simplest test is whether you can run a meeting “smoothly”, so that the technical and non-technical people in the room understand each other’s problems and needs.

For PMs, it depends on which P you mean: product or project? A product manager and a project manager do different things; one faces outward and the other faces inward. Product is mostly about the product and is more outward-facing, toward customers. Project is about the R&D team inside the company. That said, a lot of companies only hire one PM, who does everything because of cost, so you deal with customers and with the developers on your team.

A PM, after all, is a PM and not a software engineer, so they don’t need to know a lot of technical detail. But they still need some basics, and a lot of people ask: how much do you actually need to know?

My answer is very simple. Say you’re a PM and you’re sitting in a meeting with software engineers. Can you follow what they’re discussing? That’s enough. If you can follow it, I think that’s good for your grasp of the product and good for you as a PM. Because you understand some of the technical side, when you explain things to users, they can feel more at ease about how the thing actually works. Mainly, if you can follow what the team is discussing in meetings, I think you’re in decent shape. If you have zero technical knowledge, you won’t understand what they’re talking about.

If you do understand, working together goes much faster. A PM’s job is to act as the communication bridge between the company and the outside, so you spend a lot of time communicating with the team.

How to write a resume and prepare for interviews in Canada

J: I’m sure many listeners are very interested in job hunting abroad, and for most international students that’s probably the end goal. Jamie skipped the study-abroad part and went straight to what many people dream of, so let’s keep talking about job hunting abroad! Jamie, what should people watch out for when job hunting in Canada? For example, is there a special resume format, or a way of writing that makes it easier to at least get past the first round on LinkedIn?

On resumes: a lot of Taiwanese resumes I’ve seen include a photo. Whatever you do, don’t include a photo! However long your experience is, 5 years, 10 years, whatever, keep it to one or two pages, and never, ever more than two. List your experience starting from your first job. That part is pretty basic and everyone knows it.

What people usually don’t know is how to write the description for each work experience. It’s actually simple: put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Imagine you’re the interviewer spending 5 to 7 seconds on a resume. Look at your own resume and ask whether, after 5 to 7 seconds, you’d want to interview this person.

Look at your resume from that angle and you’ll probably find plenty to improve. Besides writing in the impact of every project you’ve worked on, as I said earlier, I’m not sure about other roles, but for software engineers you have to list the tech stack you used, so people know which tools you can work with. Also, in North America many companies don’t have a recruiter read your resume first. They put it through an AI system that searches for keywords. If your resume doesn’t include the keywords they want, it never even gets seen; the AI filters it out first. So keywords matter.

How do you find those keywords? Say I want a front-end engineer job. I search for front-end engineer roles on LinkedIn, and I can see that this company needs React, Vue, TypeScript, and so on. Those are the things they want.

J: After the resume comes the interview, which I think is the biggest hurdle for most people job hunting abroad. You mentioned behavioural questions earlier. Could you give an example, or tell us how to prepare ahead of time?

I have a big cheat sheet, a Word document with all of my own interview Q&A. First is my self-introduction, in English of course. Then come all kinds of behavioural questions, like “What’s the hardest technical problem you’ve faced?” You think of examples from your past work and write them up in STAR format. I don’t know about other jobs, but software engineering interviews are all remote (every one I’ve had was), so you can look at your cheat sheet during the interview and say it smoothly.

So yes, I strongly recommend having a cheat sheet. First, writing it is itself practice in producing English. Second, when those questions come up in an interview, you’ve already practiced, so your mind won’t go blank wondering what to say. You’ve prepared.

How can someone with a full-time job prepare for English interviews?

J: You were already working long hours in Taiwan. How did you use your time after work to build your spoken English for interviews abroad?

Wow, that’s a really good question. Mostly I used weekends. On weekday evenings, if I didn’t have overtime and had some free time, I’d spend a little time on it, but not memorizing vocabulary. I’d listen to podcasts or watch stand-up on YouTube, something more relaxed, partly so I wouldn’t be too stressed after a tiring day at work. On weekends I’d do more intensive training, which mostly meant talking and talking. You can find an online English tutor for that.

Work abroad or study abroad? Advice for university students

J: Jamie, do you have any advice for university students or listeners who are planning to work abroad?

I think going abroad to work and going abroad to study are quite different. Working is just working; you’re living in a different country, so I think it costs you somewhat less than studying abroad. The money you spend is at most the cost of moving plus a little for the visa. The time you spend goes into sending out resumes and interviewing.

Studying abroad, I think, is a big commitment of time and money (let’s call it an investment). I once wanted to study abroad too, but it fell through because of the pandemic, so I understand the mindset of people preparing to go. My advice is if you’re going to study abroad, you have to know why you want to go abroad in the first place. A lot of people see others going abroad and assume it means earning a lot and living well, but most international students actually have a pretty hard life. If you don’t plan ahead and don’t know why you’re going, there’s a good chance the outcome won’t match what you expected.

Do you need a master’s degree to become an engineer in Canada?

A lot of people ask me: if I want to switch to software engineering, do I need a master’s in a related field? That’s a hard one to answer. It mostly depends on whether you want to work in Taiwan or abroad! In Taiwan, the culture really cares about degrees. If you have zero related work experience and no related degree, it’s genuinely hard to get into the field. Even in Taiwan, though, I wouldn’t really recommend just going to do a master’s in computer science, because it’s very demanding. A master’s takes two years. If you get in, study for maybe half a semester and then realize you really don’t like it, you still have a year and a half left. I think that whole thing is a big waste of time.

Many of the people who ask me this aren’t genuinely interested in it. They don’t even know whether they’re interested. They just think being a software engineer looks easy, and that’s why a lot of them consider it. They haven’t thought carefully about whether they’re interested, and they haven’t tried it! My advice is to try it first. Take an online course, maybe one or two weeks long, and see how it feels. Those courses usually come with assignments you do at home. See whether you actually like it, because maybe you don’t, right?!

If you really do like it, then decide whether to do a related master’s. Then there’s another question: what if someone already has relevant experience, say they’re already a software engineer in Taiwan, but they want to move abroad? As we discussed, the hardest part of going abroad is the visa, and that’s why most people go the study-abroad route. You get a work permit after graduating, so you don’t have a visa problem.

So most people ask: if I want to be a software engineer abroad, would you recommend doing a master’s there?

Everyone’s situation is different. I didn’t study here; I came straight over. My view is that if you already have experience in this field in Taiwan, then setting the visa aside, your skills should transfer abroad without much pain, because people in this field use roughly the same things. The only differences are English, which you really have to improve on your own, and the visa. Whether it’s worth spending two years and the tuition to learn something you already know, just for a visa, is something I think you should think hard about!

Tech moves fast. I have many friends here who studied computer science, and I’ve seen their school projects and their midterm and final exams. To us that material is extremely basic. In other words, if you already have experience in Taiwan, I’ll be blunt: you’ll probably get nothing out of that program here. What schools teach is very basic, and some of it is even outdated, because professors can’t pick up new technology as fast as industry does. Industry always gets there first, and only after a technology has matured does it slowly make its way into university courses.

So do you want to spend that time and money learning things you already know, for the sake of your future? That’s something everyone can think about: are you willing to do it? If you really don’t want to spend the time and money, Canada has quite a few visa options. Some, like the LMIA, are harder. I’ve written up some visa options in detail, and the working holiday is one of them; it’s a visa you can get without studying here, so it’s worth a look.

How good does your spoken English need to be to work abroad?

J: Many people wonder what level their spoken English needs to reach before they’re willing to speak up or try an English interview. Jamie, do you have any thoughts on spoken English from back then? Or, after actually working with colleagues, what has speaking English at work been like?

Oh, got it, sure. I can share, but I might not be the best person to ask. I have to go back to grad school for this. I did my master’s at National Chung Cheng University, and our school had a dual degree program with a sister school, the University of Miami in the US.

The first time I started studying English seriously was for the TOEFL, because I wanted to get into that dual degree program and go on exchange to the school in Michigan. In the dual degree program you studied one year at Chung Cheng and one year in Miami, paid Chung Cheng’s tuition, and ended up with two degrees.

After training for the TOEFL, you can really feel how much your English has improved. In the end I didn’t do the dual degree, but in the second semester of my second year of grad school I left my advisor and my thesis behind and went to Australia for a study tour of a little over two months. That was the first time I actually used the English I had learned in daily life, and over those two months I went from struggling to being comfortable living in English. That happened before I finished grad school.

After graduating, I started speaking English on my own and didn’t find it that hard, because I had already been through the painful part and learned a lot of vocabulary and grammar. So when I kept working on my English later, I found the learning curve looked like this: at first it feels hard, hard, hard, hard. Then at some point it starts going up. I think everyone has felt this. Once you reach that point, self-study goes fast, because you’re familiar with the language. It’s like Chinese for us right now: you hear a word you don’t know, someone explains it, and the next time you hear it, I bet there’s a 99% chance you’ll remember it forever, because it’s your language. English works the same way. So after I graduated, improving my English on my own wasn’t a big problem.

After that I went straight to work at an American company, where everything was in English, so even in Taiwan I was quite used to working and holding meetings in English. Back to your question of how to tell whether your English is good enough to work abroad. It’s actually very simple: imagine you’re already working abroad. What does working abroad involve? Meetings in English, right? You may also need to write emails and documentation in English. Try doing those things in English yourself. Then presentations: if you work abroad, you’ll definitely need to give presentations. Pick a topic. It doesn’t have to be built from scratch or something you’ve studied. If I’m a software engineer, for instance, I’d present a tool I want to share. Do a presentation like that, and once you’ve done all of these things in English, you’ll have a good idea of the gap between your level and the level you need.

Why does Canada take in so many immigrants? Two paths: study or work

J: The US H1B lottery keeps getting harder (a 10-20% selection rate), and many people are starting to consider studying in Canada instead. Is that because it’s easier to get status in Canada after studying, and once you have status you can go work in the US?

Yes. Canada’s current policy is that it badly needs young workers, so it’s taking in lots of immigrants. Because they need people, they go about it in two ways. The first is recruiting talent from overseas, people like me who come here to work. The second is producing the talent the country needs domestically, by bringing in international students to study here and guiding them so that after graduating they can fill the country’s needs. So Canada’s intention is for you to stay.

Canada vs. the US vs. Taiwan: life, pay and work culture

What living in Canada is like

J: Since we’re comparing Canada and the US, I think I, and a lot of listeners, would like to know what life in Canada is like, or whether you have any observations from daily life to share.

Life in Canada is really quite different from the US. I’ve been to the US several times, and every time I walk down an American street I’m on edge, scared I might get stabbed the next second. It feels scary. In Canada you don’t really have to worry about that, and there are fewer problems with racism. As for healthcare, it’s free in Canada except for dental and eye care, which you pay for yourself, and because of that most companies cover them for you. But because healthcare is free, it gets somewhat overused, so you have to wait a long time.

In daily life, I think the biggest difference between the US and Canada is that in the US it’s easy to feel like an outsider, and in Canada I don’t feel that way. Everyone here is from somewhere else, so you don’t feel like you’re outside the circle. In the US, I think you would. I worked at an American company in Taiwan (not Amazon). When I joined, the company had only recently come to Taiwan from the US. Our CEO was American, and many of my colleagues and the senior leaders were all American. Our team had about 15 or 16 people: in Taiwan there was one Indian, one Filipino, one Malaysian and one or two Taiwanese, and everyone else was on the US side. In that environment I felt it very clearly, for example in small talk before meetings or in online activities (it was during the pandemic, so we had some online activities). In those moments with my American colleagues, I could clearly feel that our cultures were very different. I don’t really know how to describe it, but you can clearly feel that you’re not one group. In Canada, when I’m with my colleagues, I don’t feel left out, because there are so many ethnicities here.

J: Very subjective, but I think it rings true! Canada sounds like a cultural melting pot.

How much do software engineers earn in Canada? Toronto salaries and taxes

J: I think many people also want to know how salaries in Canada compare with Taiwan, or even the US. If I do the same job, will I make more money in Canada?

I’ll give you a reference point, a very average one, because Canada is huge and every province is different. With my five years of full-time experience, from what I’ve seen, the average annual salary in Toronto is around CAD 130,000 to 160,000 (roughly NT$2 million to just over NT$3 million), or even a bit more. But the taxes are really heavy! Like Taiwan, Canada has tax brackets: once you go above a certain threshold, your tax rate goes up.

In my case, my tax is close to 40%. I don’t think it’s that high in the US, is it? So you often hear people say that even though you earn more, you don’t necessarily save much more. You really don’t save faster here. A lot of people assume you earn a lot abroad and come with the goal of making money. If making money is your goal, you should go to the US, not Canada. You come to Canada to enjoy work-life balance.

Comparing work environments in Taiwan and Canada

J: Jamie, you’ve been working in Canada for about two years now. How would you compare the work environment in Taiwan and Canada, in terms of salary, after-tax income, work culture, company culture or getting along with colleagues?

Wow, there’s so much! I think every single aspect is different, hahaha. Leaving American companies aside, because they really have an American culture, Taiwanese companies are very different in culture. Salary is one point. But I don’t feel richer in Canada, because living costs and taxes are higher here, and this is very subjective. On salary, if you can already earn over NT$2 million a year in Taiwan, then after Canada’s high taxes and high cost of living, you might actually save faster in Taiwan. Not necessarily, though. Everyone’s lifestyle is different; this is just my very subjective impression.

Salaries in Canada look higher on the surface, but so are living costs, and taxes are high too. For many people already earning NT$2 to 3 million or more a year at big Taiwanese semiconductor companies, saving in Canada won’t necessarily be faster than in Taiwan. Working hours are shorter, though, so quality of life is much higher.

On culture, I think bosses here trust their employees more. In Taiwan, for example, there’s a culture of clocking in, and even after you finish your work you have to stay in the office until it’s time to leave. Here it’s not like that at all. You’re judged on results: you don’t have to go into the office, your hours are very flexible, and you only need to finish your assigned tasks before the sprint ends. The rest of the time, nobody cares where you are or what you’re doing; you just need to be online for meetings. Those are some of the differences in salary, company culture and flexibility.

Taxes and social welfare in Canada

On that note, there’s something I really want to share; I was just discussing it with Oli a few days ago. I think the biggest difference between Canada and the US is that Canada is socialist and the US is capitalist. In the US, rich people can be very rich, but poor people are really, really poor, which is sad. Canada isn’t like that; Canada is socialist. To me, socialism means the government takes from the rich to help the poor, which is why people like us pay a lot of tax. People at the bottom of society are actually taken care of quite well here, because they get a lot of subsidies and government benefits. So capable people can’t really get rich here, and people at the bottom don’t fall very far. You can see this clearly in many Canadian policies. In the US, Ivy League schools and other top universities are very expensive. Canada isn’t like that. The best universities here are UT, UBC and MACU, and they’re not expensive at all for domestic students. Education here is completely free from childhood through high school, really free at public schools; I’m not sure about private schools. But most parents send their kids to public school, because the Canadian government tries hard to make public school resources very equal. Everything here is about equality, so you don’t get that kind of educational elite.

Canada wants everyone to have fair access to learning resources. It doesn’t want a situation where you’re rich, so you go to a very good school, the very good school gives you good resources, and you then find it easier to become part of the elite, the upper layer of society, once you start working. I think that happens very easily in the US. You can clearly see families reproducing their class, but in Canada that doesn’t really happen.

Canada’s public health insurance also covers foreigners, even those who don’t have status yet. Foreigners with a work permit, for example, are covered too. As long as you have a work permit, you get access to everything Canada offers. Healthcare really is comprehensive, almost absurdly free, and the service is very good. It’s so good that our company’s head of HR got pregnant the year before last, or maybe early last year, took a year off, still hasn’t come back, and is on full pay! Part of the full pay is a company benefit and part comes from Canada. If you get pregnant and give birth here, all the hospital costs and anything else you can think of are completely free. And if you have an accident here, a car crash or whatever, your surgery is free, your hospital stay is free, and even your meals in hospital are free. I thought it was crazy that a country could do healthcare like this, and then I thought: ah, that’s where our high taxes go.

Coming here single is a terrible deal. If you have a family and kids, it’s a great deal. That has to do with taxes. If you have kids, their education here is completely free through high school, and there’s also a child benefit, the “milk money”, to help buy things. If you’re single here, you’re really paying taxes for these families. You’re supporting them, because you pay a lot of tax and get none of the benefits yourself. You really need a family here to get those benefits back. That’s socialism.

J: It sounds like a lot of policies Taiwan wants to implement have already worked in Canada, like the state raising kids from age 0 to 6, right?

Yes. And the retirement benefits here are pretty good too! But the taxes are heavy.

J: Thank you so much, Jamie, for coming on Jason’s Career Folder and sharing your experience with job hunting abroad, when to switch careers, and the software engineering career path. I hope everyone got something out of this episode, whether it’s about studying abroad, working abroad or managing your time after work!

Notes and corrections: healthcare, working and immigrating to Canada, income tax

A few additions and corrections to points discussed in the podcast (in Chinese):

– On healthcare being completely free

The population has grown so fast in recent years that the healthcare system is overloaded, so seeing a specialist means waiting 3 to 6 months or more… (For minor illnesses, seeing a family doctor is still fairly quick. With my own family doctor, if I call in the morning I can sometimes be seen the same day, and if that day is full, I can at least get an appointment the next day.)

– Why would Canadian companies accept a foreigner’s resume?

A correction: most industries still care quite a lot about whether applicants have local Canadian work experience, but my sense is that for more technical roles they care a bit less. (e.g. when my company hires sales, it pays close attention to whether a candidate has local sales experience, but it doesn’t have that requirement when hiring developers.)

– On the path of studying in Canada ⮕ working after graduation ⮕ applying to immigrate

This path isn’t as easy as it used to be. Canada opened lots of programs and drew in international talent to immigrate because it badly needed young workers (and blue-collar openings far outnumbered > white-collar ones). But so many people have arrived in the last few years that white-collar jobs are now very hard to find…

– I misspoke when I said my income tax is close to 40%. It’s actually in the low 30s, and with the RRSP contributions my company withholds plus a few other deductions, the total comes to nearly 40%. If you want to know roughly how much tax will come off your salary, try this Income tax calculator Canada: https://ca.talent.com/tax-calculator

– In the last part, about improving spoken English, I don’t think I gave much useful advice, but I wrote a related post (in Chinese) a while ago that you can check out.

FAQ: working in Canada

Can Taiwanese work in Canada without studying there first?

Yes. The common route is to get an offer from a Canadian employer and then apply for an employer-specific work permit; for most roles the employer first needs a positive LMIA (IRCC). People aged 18 to 35 can also apply for an IEC Working Holiday (IEC). Jamie didn’t study abroad; she got her offer in Taiwan and then moved to Canada to work.

What are the requirements for Taiwanese applying for a Canadian working holiday?

According to the Government of Canada website, Taiwanese applying for the IEC Working Holiday must be 18 to 35 (inclusive). You can stay up to 12 months, need at least CAD 2,500 and health insurance for your whole stay, and can take part in IEC only once in your lifetime (IEC eligibility by country). Check the official announcements for each year’s quota.

What are the options if I don’t get picked for the working holiday?

You can look for an employer willing to sponsor you and go the employer-specific work permit route (most need an LMIA); tech roles may qualify for the Global Talent Stream (GTS). If you’ve worked at least 1 year at an overseas office of a multinational, you can look into an intra-company transfer (IRCC). The IEC Young Professionals category requires an offer related to your profession first.

Where can I find jobs in Canada?

You can use the Canadian government’s Job Bank and filter for jobs marked as “recruiting international candidates” (Job Bank). Jamie applied to a large number of jobs on LinkedIn and suggests building your network to get referrals.

Can I apply to immigrate after working in Canada?

You can look into Express Entry. The Canadian Experience Class requires 1 year of skilled work experience in Canada within the past 3 years, while the Federal Skilled Worker program counts overseas experience and requires language at CLB 7 (Express Entry eligibility). Whether you’re invited still depends on your score and each round of invitations.

How much do software engineers earn in Canada?

Jamie said on the show that, based on her five years of full-time experience, the average annual salary for software engineers in Toronto is about CAD 130,000 to 160,000, but taxes are heavy. She later clarified that her income tax is actually in the low 30s, and with the RRSP contributions her company withholds and other deductions, the total is close to 40%. This is her personal observation, not an official statistic.