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SAANICH · L-1A FIELD GUIDE

Should launch troubleshooting be omitted from the L-1A role?

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THE DIRECT ANSWER

No. The record should describe the actual work and assess the role’s primarily managerial or executive character.

Explain the context and responsibility

Identify what is temporary, who performs routine work and the authority the applicant exercises. Do not invent a purely strategic job that the business will not support.

The regulation defines managerial capacity around supervising other supervisory, professional or managerial employees, or managing an essential function at a senior level, together with authority to hire and fire and discretion over daily operations. The managerial or executive classification asks what the person does in an ordinary week: who reports to them, which decisions they take without approval, what function or budget they control, and how much of the time is spent doing operational work personally. L-1A requires a corporate link as parent, branch, subsidiary, or affiliate and one uninterrupted full-time year abroad in a managerial, executive, or specialized-knowledge capacity during the relevant preceding three-year period. A first-line supervisor is not managerial merely because of the supervisory duties unless the employees supervised are professional, so a petition built purely on a headcount of operators is exposed. A company asserts that the position it offers sits in managerial or executive capacity and that a qualifying relationship exists; the applicant supplies the year of qualifying employment abroad within the preceding three years. Draft the proposed role from the organisation chart and the delegation of authority rather than from the announcement, and describe the foreign role the same way, out of records that existed before anyone considered a transfer.