SfC In The News
August/September 2000
Encouraging new programs help foreign-trained
professionals get into work force
"... we take the most talented people and we bring them to Canada to be unemployed..."
By Olga Boutsis Herrmann
Parking lot attendants with engineering degrees. Trained physicians working the graveyard shift as security guards. However incongruous and wasteful such scenarios may seem, they are the dismal reality for many foreign-trained professionals in Canada. But, within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), there are some encouraging programs that are allowing employers to experience the rich contributions these foreign-trained professionals can bring to their company and their new country.
 
Take Simin Gheflati for example. She arrived from Iran a year ago, and soon after that, the foreign-trained accountant feared that her fate here could be a demeaning survival job.
 
"I met a lady who was here from Spain," says Gheflati. "She said she was an accountant, too, but she was doing house cleaning. She needed the money… I felt sorry, and scared for myself."
 
Today, Gheflati is an intermediate accountant at Canada 3000, working on obtaining her professional accounting designation. She attributes her successful and relatively swift foray into the Canadian workplace to the 12-week STIC (Sector-specific orientation, Terminology, Information & Counselling) program for foreign-trained accountants at Skills for Change. The STIC program is also available for engineers and health care professionals as a 6-week program.
 
Skills for Change is a not-for-profit organization that has developed ground-breaking programs designed to help highly-skilled newcomers get to the jobs within their field – to the countless job opportunities that Canadian immigration officials and embassies seemed to allude to when the applicants were told ‘your skills are just what Canada needs.’
 
To understand how recent community agency initiatives are beginning to help foreign-trained newcomers, one must examine the obstacles inherent to accessing jobs as a foreign-trained immigrant.
 
"Through our [immigration] selection, we take the most talented people and we bring them to Canada to be unemployed," says Peggy Edwards, executive director at Skills for Change, as she reflects on how a "deskilling" process takes place once those who entered in the ‘skilled/independent’ category arrive here.
 
Barriers to joining the workforce and to contributing to the economy abound as foreign-trained professionals come to learn that they must have their academic credentials assessed, only to find little recognition of their work and educational qualifications abroad. Before granting a licence, many of the 34 professional regulatory bodies in Ontario require that costly exams be written – exams that reveal more the newcomers’ weakness in sector-specific language skills, rather than highlighting their rich knowledge. Language skills must be worked on and some retraining is necessary to meet qualifications. But all this requires time and money, and all the while, many highly-trained individuals such as engineers and accountants, who can, to a degree, work in a job related to their field without a designation (unlike physicians and pharmacists who must be licensed to work), are being turned away by employers who require Canadian job experience and forced to do survival work.
 
It is no wonder then, that the recent study by research analyst Michelle Goldberg of the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities The Facts are In! Newcomers’ Experience in Accessing Regulated Professions in Ontario reveals that less than 25 per cent of 643 foreign-trained professionals interviewed worked in their exact field, and that 46.8 per cent are doing something unrelated to their background.
 
"Getting them in the workforce and giving them the opportunity to show their stuff," says Susan Galea, STIC program coordinator at Skills for Change, "is what makes all the difference and opens the right doors."
 
The pilot phase of STIC in 1998 focused on licensing procedures, but now occupational terminology and the job search and career components of the program are key (e.g. resumes, cold-calling, etc). According to Galea, the goal is to understand the language of the workplace and more generally the culture of the workplace in order to get a job.
 
And the results are stellar! Seventy per cent of STIC participants are employed within six months.
 
`According to Galea, the goal is to understand the language of the workplace and more generally the culture of the workplace in order to get a job.'
- Susan Galea, STIC program coordinator
"Another valuable aspect of programs like STIC is bringing people together who are at the same professional level," says Galea. "All of them have found themselves starting from scratch and have suffered a blow to their self-esteem because of loss of status. Just the network and the camaraderie of being in a group with your peers is magic."
 
Skills for Change also has a mentoring program in place where the foreign-trained newcomer is matched with a working professional who can offer contacts and concrete advice as to what employers are looking for. The agency also offers a volunteer three-month work experience placement (WEP) program that helps people gain work experience and get the all-important letter of reference from the Canadian employer.
 
"Eighty-three per cent of our clients who have done work experience are employed within three months of completing their placement, and 33 per cent of those were hired by the host company," says Galea.
 
The Toronto District School Board’s ‘World of Work’ program at the Overland Learning Centre, offering job search skills and a Canadian job experience, has been running since 1989 and has achieved strong employment results, too.
 
"People are getting jobs even before co-op placement is over," says Wendy Terry, coordinator of the World of Work program. "One third are placed even before the end of the co-op because they’ve learned to be aggressive."
 
In addition to resume writing, job interview skills and cold-calling, cultural workplace differences are looked at during the first part of the nine-week program.
 
"It’s a huge learning process to immigrate to a new country and understand the cultural shift," says Terry. "Our students come in to a different culture that values aggressiveness in a caller, emphasis on bragging about yourself and talking about your skills and personality," says Terry. "It’s a huge learning process to immigrate and then to understand the cultural shift."
 
Bringing 15 years of senior marketing experience with her from Russia, Natalia Vesselova found she was a valuable asset to her co-op host, Canadian Paper Connection Inc. (CPC Inc.).
 
When I started to work as a sales coordinator in my co-op, I wasn’t sure how I could apply my experience," she says. "But within one month I got confidence. I can do the job, and I could compete in the Canadian job market."
 
Vesselova was recently offered a contract at CPC Inc.
 
"What we’re actually doing is tapping into a rich resource that a lot of employers ignore," says CPC Inc.’s human resource manager, Asha Burry. "We’ve had amazing luck with the newcomers because they bring such a vast experience with them. And with globalization, we’re doing so much with other countries and we need people with experience in different markets."
 
"Demand is going to bring about greater change," says Accessible Community Counselling and Employment Services’ (A.C.C.E.S) Catherine Pond, who witnessed first-hand how a "huge shortage" of pharmacists became "a perfect example of all sectors working together" in creating a variation of the STIC model for pharmacists.
 
"We worked with the College of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto, and MTCU’s Access to Professions & Trades Unit funded the project," says A.C.C.E.S.’s operations manager. "It was unique having the licensing body involved, and potentially there may be more coming out of the pilot."
 
"Licensing is an issue, but Ontario Hydro, for example, has hired non-licensed engineers through consultant firms when it realized it was in need of engineers," Pond says.
 
Skills for Change actually developed an internship program with Ontario Hydro where foreign-trained engineers were hired for six months as paid interns "with the idea to train them as permanent staff," says Galea. "They’ve hired two so far, and are looking at hiring more."
 
These encouraging programs and pilot projects offer a glimmer of hope to the grim state of affairs for foreign-trained professionals.
 
The STIC program certainly offered hope to Gheflati who, before finding Skills for Change, was discouraged and felt that "most of the people don’t respect our experience and knowledge from back home."
 
"But now where I work [Canada 3000], my manager really appreciates my knowledge and skills," she says. "He appreciates my work."
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