Whether the course you are about to pay for leads to a work visa afterwards is not a matter of anyone's opinion, including ours. Four governments publish the list. Canada's names the fields of study that qualify for a post-study work permit, Australia's Core Skills Occupation List holds 456 occupations, New Zealand's Green List is split into two tiers with different rewards, and the UK's Immigration Salary List changes the salary you have to earn.
Nobody reads them to you in a counselling room, so here is what each one actually does.
Canada: the list only binds you if it is not a degree
This is the single most misunderstood rule of the four, and it cuts in a helpful direction.
If you graduate with a bachelor's, master's or doctoral degree, IRCC exempts you from the field of study requirement completely. Your subject does not have to be on any list. A degree is the list.
If you study anything else, a diploma or a certificate at a college, then the field of study has to appear on the eligible list, and your programme's code has to be on it when you submit either your study permit application or your work permit application. The rule applies to everyone who applied for a study permit on or after 1 November 2024. Older applicants, and people who applied for the work permit before that date, are outside it.
There is also a piece of genuinely good news buried in the same page. IRCC states that for 2026 it will not add or remove any eligible fields of study. A frozen list is a rare thing in this business: it means a college programme chosen against today's list should still qualify by the time the permit is applied for, which has not been true for the last two years.
The practical instruction is short. Doing a degree: choose the subject on its merits. Doing a college diploma: check the specific programme code against the eligible list before you pay a deposit, and get the code in writing from the college rather than matching the programme name by eye.
New Zealand: two tiers, and the difference between them is years
New Zealand's Green List is the list of jobs the country says it needs people for, and it is divided into tiers by skill level.
A Tier 1 role leads to the Straight to Residence visa, which lets you stay in New Zealand indefinitely. A Tier 2 role leads to Work to Residence, which requires at least 24 months of acceptable work in New Zealand before residence is on the table.
Both paths need the same thing underneath: a job, or an offer, with an accredited employer, full time at 30 hours a week or more, genuine, and either permanent or a fixed term of at least 12 months.
So the question to ask about a New Zealand course is not whether the field is on the Green List but which tier the job it leads to sits in, because the answer is worth roughly two years of your life. That is a question with a checkable answer and most people never ask it.
Australia: 456 occupations, and one list instead of three
Australia replaced its old set of occupation lists with the Core Skills Occupation List, announced on 3 December 2024. It gives access to temporary skilled migration for 456 occupations, and it was built from labour market analysis by Jobs and Skills Australia rather than assembled from the previous lists.
The reason this matters to somebody choosing a course now is that almost every guide written before December 2024 refers to lists that no longer operate. If the page you are reading mentions a medium or long-term strategic skills list, it predates the change and its advice about which courses are safe is out of date.
The UK: the list moves the salary, not the door
The UK's is the narrowest of the four, and it is the one most often oversold.
GOV.UK's wording is that if your job is on the Immigration Salary List, the minimum salary is 80 percent of the route's usual minimum rate for a Skilled Worker or Health and Care Worker visa. The list was last updated on 11 November 2025.
That is a discount on one requirement. It is not a route of its own, and it does not find you a sponsor. The thing that stops most Nepali graduates in the UK is not the salary threshold but the absence of an employer willing to sponsor at all, and no list fixes that.
What this is really a test of
Read the four together and a pattern shows up that is more useful than any individual list.
Canada rewards the level you study at. New Zealand rewards the job you end up in. Australia rewards the occupation. The UK rewards having an employer, and discounts the salary if the occupation is short.
None of them rewards the course being popular. "Trending course" is a phrase from a marketing page, and the four governments that decide whether you can stay do not use it. Every one of them publishes a list, every list has a date on it, and every list is free to read before you commit a rupee.
If somebody is recommending a course to you and cannot name which of these four lists they checked and when, they have not checked one.
Before you enrol, three checks
Ask for the programme code, not the programme name, and check it against the list for the country you are going to. Names are marketing; codes are what the government reads.
Ask which tier or which list entry the job at the end sits on, and what that specific entry gives you. In New Zealand's case the difference between tiers is 24 months.
Ask when the list you are being shown was last updated. Australia's changed in December 2024 and the UK's in November 2025, and advice written before those dates is not wrong on purpose. It is just old.