well, the lawyer wouldn't be to change the rules but to look at my options overall, and to clear up things like can the 1560 hours be from two jobs (there are lots of mixed messages, people getting PR that way others saying they didnt get it cause it needed to be one job)
I have an Irish passport and UK, (I'm here using the Irish one) but now at 38 I imagine too old to participate.
I could switch to a study permit I guess.
A lawyer can certainly help with the rules.
However the rules are extremely straight forward as it relates to CEC. There is no requirement for it to be one job or one single occupation. (It sounds like you are getting confused between the FSW and CEC rules.)
There is a requirement for one full year of work experience to be from a single NOC and for that work experience to be continuous apply to the FSW stream only of EE. These rules do not apply to CEC under EE. As long as the work experience is from a skilled NOC (i.e. NOC A, B or 0), you can mix multiple jobs, multiple NOCs and the work experience doesn't need to be continuous for CEC.
However you need to make sure you are counting the 1560 hours the right way. If you work multiple jobs or work a lot of overtime, this doesn't mean that you can count 60 hours within one week and count this as basically two weeks of work experience. This is the right way to do the math to make sure you have enough hours to claim the 1 year of work experience:
1) Count all weeks where you worked 30 hours or more as 1 week of work experience (doesn't matter if you worked 30 hours or 60 hours or 90 hours, it's still only counted as 1 week).
2) Add up all of the hours in your part time weeks and divide by 30
Add the above two above totals together. If the total is 52 or more, you have one year of work experience. (There is one further caveat. If you are working one full time role and then a second part time or full time role on top of that, you can't double count. All of this just adds up to 1 week of work experience regardless how many hours you worked.)
