Published on : September 25, 2021
Key Highlights:
The National Occupational Classification (NOC), the national reference of eligible occupations in Canada, has undergone some new changes released in March this year.
The NOC is Canada’s national system of organizing and identifying occupations. It consists of over 30,000 job titles or codes combined into 500 unit groups that are then structured according to four skill levels and ten broad job categories.
It was developed as part of a joint partnership between Statistics Canada and Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC). It is used for the economic immigration programs like Express Entry’s streams, Provincial Nominee Program and other PNPs.
Apart from these, the NOC is also used by Canadian employers to write job requirements and identify the skills required for new job postings.
The NOC is updated every five years, with the most recent one released this year.
The NOC 2021 is a major structural revision that has updated the NOC’s framework, making it more accurate, consistent and flexible. The new changes under this will come into effect in the second half of 2022.
The first change brought by the NOC 2021 is replacing skill levels with the Training, Education, Experience and Responsibilities (TEER), which is more precise.
The second change is the number of TEER categories. In the new changes, the number of categories has gone up to six categories from the four levels of the 2016 version.
Here is the definition of the new TEER categories:
