On 4 September 2026 a temporary public policy took effect letting anyone holding a valid work permit study in Canada without a study permit — any institution, any field, any course of six months or less. No application. No fee. You prove eligibility by showing your work permit to the school.
It is a genuinely useful change, and the coverage of it has been uniformly positive.
Almost none of that coverage quotes the following sentence, which is on IRCC's own page:
If you're studying full-time under this temporary public policy, any work experience you gain during your studies won't count toward your eligibility for the Canada experience class, [or] Canadian work experience points. — Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada
Read that again with your own timeline in mind.
Why this is worse than it sounds
The Canadian Experience Class is not one route among many. Since the last STEM draw in April 2024, IRCC has held 148 rounds and issued 306,582 invitations. CEC took 113,600 of them — 37.1%, the single largest share of anything.
To qualify you need twelve months of skilled Canadian work experience. And IRCC already excludes more than people realise: any period of self-employment is out under R87.1(3)(b), and contract work paid without source deductions generally reads as self-employment.
This policy adds a third exclusion. Take a six-month full-time course while working, and those six months do not count. Your job continues. Your pay continues. Your CEC clock stops.
Someone eleven months into building that twelve-month qualifying year, who enrols full-time in something useful in October, does not finish in November. They finish six months later than they planned — if the exclusion applies for the whole period.
The word doing the work is "full-time"
The clause is written about full-time study. IRCC's page states the exclusion for full-time study and does not extend it to part-time.
That is the most actionable thing on this page: if you are inside a CEC qualifying window, the difference between enrolling full-time and part-time may be the difference between the months counting and not counting.
It is also the point at which to stop taking advice from a website. The distinction between full-time and part-time study is defined by the institution and assessed by IRCC on the facts of your case, and the cost of getting it wrong is measured in months of your life. If you are near a CEC threshold, pay for an hour with a licensed RCIC before you register for anything. An hour is cheap against six months.
Who this actually helps
Plenty of people, and it is worth being clear that this is good news for most of them:
- Anyone not pursuing CEC. If your route is a provincial nomination on a job offer, or you are already nominated, the exclusion may not touch you at all.
- Part-time learners, on the reading above.
- Anyone needing a short credential to get licensed — the bridging course, the exam prep, the safety ticket. This removes a genuine barrier that used to require a study permit application to clear.
- Quebec workers, who do not need a CAQ for this.
And a real structural win: it is now considerably easier to fix the *credential recognition* problem that leaves nearly a third of recent immigrants overqualified for the job they hold. A six-month course that unlocks a licence is exactly the thing that was previously gated behind a permit application.
What to check before you enrol
- Are you inside a CEC qualifying window? If yes, the full-time/part-time decision is a scoring decision, not just a scheduling one.
- Does your work permit outlast the course? The policy runs to six months *or until your work permit expires, whichever comes first.*
- Is there a co-op placement? A separate work permit is still required if the co-op employer or occupation differs from your current one.
- Is your route provincial rather than federal? Ontario, B.C. and Alberta score their own grids, and none of them scores CEC eligibility. Know which clock you are actually running against before you decide the exclusion matters.
Sources
The policy and the quoted clause are from IRCC's page "Public policy allowing some work permit holders to study without a study permit" on canada.ca, read 2026-09-10. Effective date 4 September 2026. IRCC describes the policy as temporary and can end it at any time; several outlets report an end date of 31 December 2027, but no end date appears on the official page, so we are not stating one.
Invitation figures are computed from IRCC's machine-readable rounds-of-invitations file, read 2026-09-06: 148 rounds and 306,582 invitations issued after 2024-04-11, of which 113,600 were Canadian Experience Class.
The self-employment exclusion is R87.1(3)(b) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations, via IRCC's operational guidance on CEC qualifying work experience.
This is not immigration advice and the full-time/part-time reading above is a reading, not a ruling. Where IRCC's page disagrees with this one, IRCC is right — tell us and it gets fixed.