Major life advice needed from wise people
 

I'm usually great at helping others but I can't seem to help myself. Long story short, I feel lost.

- I'm 25, living at home in London, working as an IT/business consultant (NOC 2171).
- In less than 6 weeks I will have my IEC open work permit which I can activate in the next year. I'm in the EE pool but only with 438 CRS points.

Lifetime ambition was to become a commercial pilot, and live/work in the US. Couldn't become a pilot due to £££, tried to move to the US with my last company (see my threads from 2017), didn't work out. I don't want to work in an office anymore. It feels like I'm wasting my life away doing something meaningless/minute. The thing is I don't know what else to do, and if moving to Canada is even going to help. I'm looking at it as a solution to my problems.. a way to start a fresh, but also a potential way to make a big mess of my life.

London is too polluted, small, congested. It doesn't feel good spending an hour commuting into central to work every day, while the queen sits in Buckingham Palace doing squat. If I move out of the family home I'll be wasting a lot of money on rent/not saving. If I buy a home (which I'm not too far from being able to), I'll be locked in my current job paying for the mortgage for a long time. That scares me. I definitely want out of the UK. I'm thinking moving to Canada gets me closer to moving to the US.

I don't have a lot of savings, and I'm worried that once I get to Toronto I'm going to run out of money within months/end up in a low-paid job/be unable to travel due to little paid annual leave in Canada. But it would also give me a better chance at a love life, since I struggle in that department in London, mostly due to living at home.

If only there was a way to magically get £80k so I can pay for pilot training and fulfil my lifelong dream... that would make me the happiest person alive.

I could do with some advice from someone older and wiser. :)

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

I can't afford to become an airline pilot though, that's the problem.. many airlines offer 1.5-year courses which take you from 0 flying hours to First Officer, but they cost a great deal of money.

I don't think moving to Canada on an IEC will help me get any closer to becoming a pilot?

I don't have a particular question.. I just want some advice on the move to Canada. I'm not sure if it's a good idea.

Edit: basically if I end up having to commute to downtown Toronto to work in an office in a job I won't enjoy, whilst paying a lot for rent and being unable to travel freely, it would be a worse situation than I'm currently in and I would like to avoid it.. However I'm hoping people are friendlier over there, the housing situation is better than London's, etc... perhaps I need a shrink, not immigration advice :-)

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

At your age and possessing an IEC, it's a very good idea. To plagiarize a pair of sneakers. Just Do It.

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

You're probably right. I haven't much to lose other than a bit of money. At the moment I feel like I will go for it. I'll submit my IEC application when I get a hold of my police check tomorrow evening. Takes about 6 weeks to get an approval. I'm planning to move in Q4.

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

Do it ...... you're young enough.

BUT do not go to Toronto or Vancouver, both are very expensive places to rent or buy houses/condos/apartments. Go to a smaller place.

If you want to stay in IT, try Kitchener/Waterloo in Ontario where I understand there are lots of IT companies.

Or try different things.

Check out how much it would cost to take initial flying lessons as a first step to fulfilling your dream.

Do not however think of coming to Canada as being easier to enter the US .............. it isn't, unless you get to PR or better, citizenship, and even then you can't just waltz across the border to a job.

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

In Canada we only really have two major passenger carriers, Air Canada and WestJet. In Europe there are many more airlines which might mean more career opportunities in terms of becoming a pilot at a major airline.

However BC does have a fairly decent shorthaul and floatplane industry from what I gather, quite a few people fly from Vancouver to Victoria, the capital city of BC as it is located on an island. So this might be something you could look into as a starting point.
https://www.harbourair.com/
https://www.seairseaplanes.com/
https://www.vancityseaplanes.com/

Vancouver has a decent and growing tech industry too, so IT is always a good fallback position. But yeah, if you're worried about housing costs, Vancouver is one of the worst places for that unfortunately as it has the most expensive real estate in the country. However Victoria might be an option as this is a little bit cheaper.

As scilly mentioned, don't think about coming to Canada as a stepping stone to the US. It would be easier to just go through the US immigration system directly. You would have to become a Canadian citizen which takes several years, and then you would be able to get a temporary TN visa to work in the US, but this visa cannot be used to get a green card from what I understand.

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

The path my cousin took was Air Cadet glider training, armed forces photo tech, observer, pilot training, fighter pilot, test pilot, commercial pilot, and then after that he just did everything else, crop spraying, bird-dogging for water bombers, F1 International Air Racing.

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

Daughter's childhood friend wanted to be a pilot. Left home after graduating high school at age 18 and moved to Florida. Took lessons to learn to fly a small plane. Often lived out of her car because money was tight. After she got her license, she started crop dusting and built up her CV/Resume and after x number of hours of flying, applied to a commercial US airline. Got hired for a small airline, i.e. Allegheny back then. She now is one of the few women pilots to fly jumbo jets as full Captain. If you want something badly enough, you sacrifice and work long and hard to achieve it. You have no dependents so you are in a perfect position to attempt to achieve your dream.

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

I work in IT with a aviation fanatic, many of his friends are Commercial pilots in the US. That is one shitty job for the first decade;

- dead legging unpaid
- furloughed unpaid
- weather delays unpaid
- paying to fly something, anything, to keep up the hours while furloughed
- no stability of employment

He's better off contract programming and flying his small plane on the weekends.

Whatever you do it will have no impact on the Queen's occupation so you might as well try living somewhere else. If nothing else two years in Canada will teach you to love the climate in the UK.

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

Then don't move to Toronto, sounds like you want to try living outside a large city, Canada has lots of options.
7 years ago I was 25 and I moved to Saskatoon Saskatchewan on an IEC Visa, I got working in agriculture with no experience, applied for PR and got it, moved to a rural town in Alberta thats still an hour into Calgary if need anything in the city or to fly out of a larger airport, an hour to the mountains, 4 hours to USA border.

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

It sounds broadly similar actually.

If you decide you don't like it, can you return to your current housing situation? If so, you have nothing to lose.

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

Every day I see people who went to Olds College. So many that I thought Olds would have its own international airport.

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

If I may, first things first. Work out what you want to do with your life and then figure out where to do it.

Take a quiet moment and sit somewhere and mentally spitball what it is you would do for the rest of your life simply for the love of it, not because it pays you well. Come up with 3 things on that list and rank them in order of how happy they'd make you to look back on on your death bed and then you know what you should be doing with your life.

Next step is to work out how to get to do those things. Some things will be geographically specific: no logging industry in the Sahara for example... If what you want to do on that list can be done where you are: stay and do them until you've got experience enough that you can do them anywhere and then go do them there.

Or, now you know what you want to do, pack a bag and head for Canada and see if you can get them done there. If you can't, come home and start again. The UK's not going anywhere (except out of the EU... don't...).

The key is knowing what you want to do. A location can inspire that to some degree so maybe relocate to Canada on your IEC, go stare at a mountain or two, swim in a lake and wrestle a moose and let the brain percolate on what your life mission is. Only when you know that can you adjust the where to match the what.

Good luck :)

Re: Major life advice needed from wise people
 

We got some little airports closeby, some big box stores, a few legal weed green houses, at least one illegal meth lab and Olds College ...