IRCC 7th Express Entry Draw of 2023
In 2023, the Express Entry Management System has helped Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to complete six draws, and as late as today, a seventh draw of the year was realased. In this seventh draw, the IRCC issued invitations to 7,000 candidates with a minimum Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) score of 490. The number of ITAs in this draw beats the previous record of 5,500 candidates invited in the last all-program draw on January 18. To put it into perspective, prior to 2023, all Express Entry draws between July and November 2022 were all-program draws that invited over 1,000 candidates each time and grew as the minimum CRS score decreased.
Express Entry Program
Canada’s express entry program falls in three broad programs:
- The Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP), where candidates should have more than one year of continuous full-time, or equivalent, paid work experience in the past 10 years in a skilled occupation. In this program, candidates should certify the IRCC thry have sufficient funds to facilitate their settlement in Canada.
- The Federal Skilled Trades Program (FSTP) – This program targets skilled workers who want to become permanent residents based on being qualified in a skilled trade.
- The Canadian Experience Class (CEC) – Here, candidates are skilled workers who have Canadian work experience and want to become permanent residents. Basically, the candidates are expected to have gained the work experience by working in Canada while under temporary resident status with authorization to work.
The seventh draw broke a pattern of program-specific draws that have been occurring over the past two months. Since the last all-program draw there have been four program-specific rounds of invitations, three for PNP-only and one for FSWP candidates. The most recent draw was PNP-only and just 697 candidates received ITAs on March 1.
