TORONTO:

A new website for professional immigrants was recently launched in Toronto.

The Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC), the Government of Canada and Scotiabank have introduced a vital new website as part of the Professional Immigrant Networks initiative (PINs) to forge connections between immigrants, employers and community agencies - all with the goal of advancing immigrant employment.

Professional immigrant networks are organised by profession or ethnicity or both - from the Latin American MBA Alumni Network to the Chinese Professionals Association of Canada, among others. Collectively they serve more than 30,000 members. The new PINs website will help newcomers access these professional immigrant networks and through them build the connections they need to find meaningful employment.

resources

The Caribbean Immigrants Network, founded by Susan Blake and Vincent Amos, is among the networks that new immigrants will find on the website. Blake, a Jamaican and former manager at Chase Funds, immigrated to Canada in April 2008. She has relatives here but they were not familiar with the resources available to newcomers so when Blake arrived she began looking for work online.

At the same time, her upbringing taught her to always give back so she sought out volunteer organisations and registered with Volunteers Canada. She received a call from the Literacy Council of Durham and it was a natural fit for her. Through that she got a job as the executive assistant to the CEO of Ajax, Pickering United Way. Then in 2008 she secured the executive assistant position of the Pediatric Oncology Group Ontario (PO).

“In the Caribbean you are trained as a generalist but here they need specialists. So it is difficult to define yourself. So I decided it had to be through action and volunteering. Then I heard of the Rothman School’s 6-month programme, “Business Edge for Internationally trained Women professionals, “ said Blake. She got a bursary, was accepted and graduated as a valedictorian.

Caribbean Immigrants Network is a small and recently formed group of professional engineers, administrators, salespeople and teachers who meet in each other’s homes, with potluck dinner, for board game nights where they share their experiences, discuss challenges and catch-up on news. At tax time they invite a tax consultant to speak with them, and they help one another, for example, when a recent member arrived, they banded together first to find him an apartment, clean it up, move him in, obtain furniture and provide transportation to a job interview.

Most of the members are from the Durham region and they are looking to support a children’s hospice as volunteers.

Through the Community Development Council of Durham, the Caribbean Immigrants Network helps out in conversation groups and three persons have already secured jobs.

Blake is also a host for the Council and is mentoring a Malaysian woman. They have worked on her resume, and Blake even went shopping with her to get a jacket.

experience

“Canada is a place you cannot allow yourself to be drowned in a puddle. I came to this country so I have to adapt to it. When you reach the airport at Pearson, you lose the status you had. You have to start again. And through my experience with PINs and with mentoring and giving back I have managed to draw all the parts of my experience into professional and personal success,” she said. Her advice to newcomers is to leave their egos behind, be open-minded enough to be employed in a different field, and seek out other people from your ethnic background.

Funded by Citizenship and Immigration Canada and sponsored by Scotiabank, PINs benefits employers as well as immigrants. With the diversifying population and the growth of the knowledge economy, recruiting internationally experienced and multi-lingual personnel is becoming a priority in most workplaces, both from the talent management and business perspectives.

Last year alone, TRIEC disseminated 100 job postings out to the professional immigrant networks from 25 employers through PINs. The new website, www.NetworksForImmigrants.ca, will make these connections even easier, with a searchable directory of networks and a messaging function for employers to post jobs.

– Neil Armstrong