Last Updated on December 11, 2020

Newfoundland & Labrador has expanded its list of in-demand occupations, adding several information and communications technology jobs.

Employers in the Atlantic Canadian province can hire foreign nationals and international graduates in the occupations without labour market testing.

The In-Demand Occupations list applies to several streams of the Newfoundland & Labrador Provincial Nominee Program (NLPNP).

Earlier in 2020, the province exempted eight categories of jobs in the healthcare sector from this process which involves a job vacancy assessment and Atlantic Immigration Program labour market testing requirements, such as advertising.

Those healthcare jobs are still exempt from the process and include:

• physicians in family medicine; psychiatry; pathology; general internal medicine; radiology; obstetrics and gynecology; anesthesia; pediatric intensivists; neonatologists; pathology (hemopathology)
• nurse practitioner;
• licensed practice nurse;
• personal care attendant;
• clinical psychologist;
• medical physicist;
• radiation therapist, and;
• dosimetrist.

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Now Newfoundland has added 20 more job categories in the IT sector to that list of high-demand, exempt positions, including engineers and developers, such as anyone who is a: 

• software developer;
• biomedical engineer;
• UI/UX developer;
• electrical engineer;
• AI developer;
• mechanical engineer;
• Python developer;
• web developer;
• .NET developer, and;
• infrastructure engineer.

The other exempt positions are technical specialists, including:

• security specialists;
• cloud specialists;
• bioinformaticians;
• computer network support specialists;
• research associates;
• data analytics experts;
• offshore technicians;
• ROV operators;
• ocean mapping specialists, and;
• technical writers.

The Newfoundland & Labrador Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) features three categories for skilled workers and international graduates:

1. Express Entry Skilled Worker
2. Skilled Worker
3. International Graduate

The province says the occupations being exempt from the labour market testing process are considered in-demand in both the public and private sectors. The move to relax requirements for candidates is designed to attract more new immigrants in those fields.

The PNP is part of the Atlantic Immigration Pilot, a joint federal-provincial program targeting skilled workers and international students.

Newfoundland has enjoyed considerable success in attracting more new permanent residents in the last two years. The latest figures show the province welcomed 1,850 new immigrants in 2019, a 64 percent increase in 2015.