Immigrants still playing career catchup
Credit to Author: Canadian Immigrant| Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2019 06:29:26 +0000
Is it taking too long for immigrants to catch up with their Canadian-born counterparts?
Anna moved to Canada from Eastern Europe 14 years ago. As an internationally trained professional, she was excited to bring her teaching experience in French combined with a degree in psychology to make a new start in Canada. But she soon found she couldn’t use her European credentials in Canada. Like many others in her situation, Anna had to be practical and find a job to support herself. “I had genuinely hoped to enrich my experience and move my career to the next level; it didn’t take me too long to realize that it was just a beautiful illusion for people without strong financial support, like me.”
Does Anna believe that her skills and experience are currently being used? “Objectively, career-wise, I am a loser who has wasted her knowledge, expertise and experience working in call centres,” she says. “Subjectively, I do my best to use my skills by adapting them to the needs of the team and it feels good that I can make a difference. But given the opportunity I know I can bring much more to the table.”
Joe from India is no stranger to call centre jobs. With a master’s degree in marketing and a PhD, both from the U.S., he has worked a variety of jobs in Canada — at an outbound call centre, as a census enumerator and even going door-to-door fundraising for a charity. In the last few years, he has continued to take on many one-year contract jobs. “I moved every year. Orillia. Montreal. Toronto. London. Toronto. I was underpaid and overworked.” Today he is enrolled in a college in Toronto, “working on getting a Canadian qualification and a Canadian network of friends,” he says.
It’s taking too long
While Anna, Joe and plenty of others manage to find a job or a contract, finding one in line with their skills and experience continues to be a challenge, as does one that unleashes their potential or enables career progression.
A recently released report by the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC), The State of Immigrant Inclusion in the GTA Labour Market reveals that it is taking too long for immigrants to catch up with their Canadian-born counterparts. It found that underemployment at the start of an immigrant’s life in Canada can have a long-lasting impact, and promoting and advancing immigrant professionals continues to be a challenge.
Further, the study finds that immigrants are underrepresented in senior leadership positions. While immigrants constitute more than half the university-educated workforce in the GTA, they are only one-third of all senior managers with a university degree.
On a positive note, the study did find that the unemployment gap between university-educated newcomers and people born in Canada is narrowing in the GTA. According to Margaret Eaton, executive director of TRIEC, “This is also a trend in the rest of Canada — but it is too early to celebrate. University-educated newcomers in the GTA are still twice as likely to be unemployed compared to people born in Canada with the same qualifications. Some groups — like women or racialized people — are getting left behind. To give an example, our report showed that newcomer women with a university degree earn on average half the amount of women born in Canada.”
Career integration
Unpacking the process of career integration is complex and is multi-layered. For instance, newcomers in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics/IT) field who earned their bachelor’s degrees in Canada are doing nearly as well as their Canadian-born counterparts. At the other end of the spectrum are newcomers with a bachelor’s degree from outside Canada in a non-STEM (everything else, including business, law, humanities, social studies, health care, and so on) subject are much worse off than their Canadian-born counterparts — especially newcomer women. The pattern is the same for people who have a degree above bachelor level.
Another recent study by B.C.-based AMSSA, Immigration for BC’s Future states: “Often, instead of focusing on the positive benefits that newcomers bring (such as international experience and education, advanced skills and an understanding of different cultural contexts) there is a focus on their deficiencies, including a lack of Canadian workplace experience or recognition of foreign credentials.”
Naveen, who moved here with a master’s degree from the U.K., says: “The first few years were the most challenging. At the very beginning it was rather difficult to find relevant employment due to the lack of the so-called ‘Canadian work experience,’ which a newcomer cannot obtain unless he or she finds employment in Canada. Getting my foot in the door was very difficult. I did contract work and part-time jobs during the first two years before I was finally offered my first permanent role.”
That, says Eaton, is one of the surprising findings of the study. “I was surprised to see that employers are still asking for Canadian experience, despite many immigrants having the expertise required for jobs. The Ontario Human Rights Commission determined in 2013 that a strict requirement for Canadian experience is a form of discrimination. Employers should be asking for specific knowledge and skillsets instead to assess the candidates better.”
Naveen adds, “It is possible that if I had done my schooling in Canada, I may have seen more career growth and could have saved time I lost during my initial years in Canada. Though my skills and experience are not fully utilized during the initial years, I feel that they are better utilized at present.”
Employer imperative
The situation calls for a variety of targeted approaches and solutions, all seeking increased support for the integration of newcomers into the labour force.
So, what can employers do? The TRIEC report reveals that employers are becoming more aware of the benefits of diversity and inclusion and have scaled up their efforts over the last 15 years to attract and retain immigrants.
“Employers, especially those with a keen interest in diversity and inclusion, are now becoming more involved in the immigrant integration process. This increases the prospects of immigrants to be employed in their own field,” Eaton says. “Immigrant integration works better with more employers on board.”
Should we be welcoming 300,000+ new immigrants into Canada every year when we are still struggling to figure out how to make integration work? Immigration is critical to Canada’s economic and labour force growth in the future, says Eaton, but so is the need to “make the integration process better for both current and future immigrants. Many newcomers are forced to take on survival jobs that don’t do justice to their valuable skills and many years of experience. Employers can play a big role in addressing this, through tapping into immigrant talent to address their skills shortages.”