Personal History section in IMM5669 is notoriously tricky, especially when you want to avoid looking like your life was a patchwork quilt of tiny time slices
Here’s how IRCC generally expects it to be filled out:
1. Short trips during employment
- The Personal History section asks “What have you been doing” for every single month of the last 10 years (or since age 18, whichever is most recent).
- You do not need to break an employment period just because you took a short trip abroad, if you remained employed and it was just vacation/business travel.
- You can keep it as one continuous line:
Date A to Date B: Employed – [Country where job is based]
You can later mention in the Travel History section (IMM5562) or a Letter of Explanation that you took trips during that period.
Reason: IRCC is looking for a continuous timeline with no unexplained gaps — travel is handled separately, so splitting for short trips is unnecessary and makes the history look choppy.
2. Change in immigration status during the same job
- If your role and employer didn’t change, you can usually keep it as one continuous employment entry.
- The “status” in IMM5669 is more about your general legal status during that period (e.g., citizen, student, worker), not necessarily every technical change in permits.
- If you want to be precise (e.g., because IRCC has asked for exact legal status changes), you can split it into:
Date C to Date C’: Employed – Implied status
Date C’ to Date D: Employed – Work permit
But in most standard submissions, one line with your main status for that job is acceptable, and you can clarify in a Letter of Explanation that the status changed during that employment.
Reason: Over-splitting makes the form harder to read and may raise questions about “gaps,” when in reality you were continuously employed.
Best practice to avoid confusion:
- Keep continuous jobs as one line unless you actually stopped working.
- Use a Letter of Explanation to detail short trips, status changes, or anything unusual — IRCC likes clarity more than excessive fragmentation.