Loading
Just a moment while this page opens.
Just a moment while this page opens.
Just a moment while this page opens.
Can you move to Canada as a civil engineer? Getting licensed, the immigration routes that fit this job, and your first steps, from official pages.
Moving to Canada as a civil engineer is possible, and it involves two separate processes. Permanent residence (PR, the right to live in Canada permanently) comes from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the federal immigration department, through the same routes other skilled workers use. The licence to practise comes from the province or territory where you work. Job Bank, the federal jobs site, shows civil engineering as regulated in every province and territory, and says a licence is required to approve engineering drawings and reports and to practise as a Professional Engineer (P.Eng.). Canada's occupation classification lists structural, environmental and geomatics engineers among civil engineers, so this page covers them. Geotechnical engineers are grouped with geological engineers instead, and the engineer page covers that field.
Canada sorts jobs with the National Occupational Classification (NOC). Immigration programs use it to identify your job and its TEER level, which says how much training the job usually needs.
TEER 1: jobs that usually need a university degree
Express Entry is the online system Canada uses to invite skilled workers to apply for permanent residence. Some of its rounds invite only people with recent work experience in a set group of jobs, called a category. This job is in:
In Canada, you need a licence to work in this job, from the regulator of the province or territory where you plan to work.
Job Bank names the regulator for each province and territory and says the steps to a licence differ in each. The steps below are those of Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO), the Ontario regulator; others follow a similar pattern with their own details. PEO starts with an eligibility survey, then sets requirements you can work on in any order:
If you are assigned exams in your own field, Engineers Canada's civil engineering syllabus, which regulators use as a guide, lists compulsory papers in structural analysis, structural design, environmental engineering, geotechnical materials, hydraulic engineering, and highway design, construction and maintenance.
For PR at the federal level, IRCC runs Express Entry, an online system for managing applications under its skilled worker programs, and scores each profile with the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS). Our Express Entry guide covers the basics, and you can try the CRS calculator before you build a profile.
Civil engineering is on IRCC's list for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) rounds. A round held for that list is limited to candidates eligible for it, and IRCC invites the top-ranking people among them. To be eligible for such a round, you need a year or more of full-time work (or equal part-time work) in a single listed occupation during the last three years, in Canada or abroad; the months need not be continuous. Eligibility for one of the Express Entry programs is also required. Our guide to category rounds explains the details.
Provinces and territories can also nominate candidates for PR; our provincial nominee guide explains how. In Alberta, the Accelerated Tech Pathway, part of the province's Express Entry stream, lists civil engineers among its eligible tech occupations. You must work full-time in Alberta or hold a genuine job offer there, from an employer whose main business is on the province's tech industry list, which includes architectural, engineering and related services. The pathway rules also require the occupation in your Express Entry profile to match that job.
Sometimes. Engineers and Geoscientists BC (EGBC), the B.C. regulator, grants a Designated Structural Engineer designation (Struct.Eng.) on top of the P.Eng. licence. Its requirements guide says many engineers who offer structural services in B.C. are not required to hold it. It is needed by engineers who want to act as Structural Engineer of Record (the engineer with overall responsibility for a building's structure) for buildings the B.C. Building Code classes as Part 3 buildings, where the local authority has adopted the program.
EGBC's designation page says that to apply, you must be a P.Eng. in B.C. with six years of structural engineering experience, at least two of them in charge of significant engineering work, including the design of at least three building projects in seismic regions completed in the previous five years. You also need the Institution of Structural Engineers' chartered membership exam, Structural Engineer registration in California or Washington State, or the US NCEES PE Structural exam, plus EGBC's BC Codes and Practices Examination.
Treating the immigration ECA as your licensing assessment. If your degree is from outside Canada, Express Entry relies on an educational credential assessment (ECA) from an organization IRCC designates, and IRCC says an ECA does not mean you will get a licence to practise a regulated profession. Regulators run their own academic checks: PEO wants a WES course-by-course report for degrees from outside Canada and the US. Read what IRCC and your regulator each ask for before ordering, so you do not pay for the wrong report. Our ECA guide explains the immigration side.
Answer our free questionnaire, which asks about your work, and get a free summary of your eligibility for every Canada pathway we assess. The full report is a later choice, never a condition.
Start the free questionnaire