Cosa de locos – Artículo de Toronto Star

Artículo de hoy del Toronto Star: «Opening closed doors», pero luego de leerlo mejor le caería el título de «Knocking on closed doors».

http://www.triec.ca/media/MediaClippings/StarJuly0405.htm

Opening closed doors
The Toronto Star
July 4, 2005

RITA DALY
STAFF REPORTER

«There is no guarantee that you will find work in your preferred occupation. You should know that, in order to work.»
— Citizenship and Immigration Canada website advice for people considering immigrating to Canada
/// QUE VIVOS HIDEPUT*S. AHORA QUE TIENEN DEMANDAS ACERCA DE ESTE FRAUDE (google Selladurai Premakumaran, y otra demanda colectiva que se viene) ENTONCES PONEN SU «DISCLAIMER». ///

The Canadian job market has been less than kind to Dhaval Shah and he can’t understand why.

The 27-year-old man arrived from India in January, a chemical engineer with an MBA, foreign work experience, and a large dose of optimism and youthful energy. What more could a Canadian employer want?

Shah has asked himself this question often as the months rolled by. He thinks he may be experiencing first-hand what sociology experts have discovered: that employers systemically discriminate against immigrants when it comes to hiring professionals.

Aaron Chaze, on the other hand, has had an entirely different experience. Also bright, well-educated and recently arrived from India, the 35-year-old investment expert was snatched up by a private investment firm.

Chaze thinks the key for foreign-trained immigrants is preparation — mental, economic and cultural — for the rough road that inevitably lies ahead. «If you come in with a half-baked idea that Canada is such a great country and everything’s going to be fine once you land, well, nothing works that way.»

Chaze is willing to concede, though, that even the most highly skilled foreign professional faces employer prejudices.

That’s why he enrolled last December in the Mentoring Partnership, a program that matches immigrants with a mentor to help them find jobs. He landed his job in January.

It’s also why Dhaval Shah, dressed in suit and tie, is sitting in a basement classroom on this night, enrolled in the same program. Shah has come to meet his own mentor, an established professional voluntarily assigned to assist him in his job search.

In the coming weeks, he will learn that a seemingly minor thing like misspelling «sales» on his resumé, or how one «sells» oneself in an interview can mean the difference between landing a job or being shown the door.

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Scores of business executives, teachers and other professionals are volunteering for the Mentoring Partnership.

Nancy Morley, a senior manager with TD Canada Trust, has been a mentor to students and manager trainees in her company for several years. She has studied Dhaval Shah’s resumé carefully. She is familiar with his career aspirations in marketing and is looking forward to meeting him for the first time.

The program, funded primarily by the federal Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, was launched last December by the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, along with a number of employment agencies in Toronto, York and Peel.

The task isn’t easy. Eighty per cent of job openings aren’t even advertised. Where positions are advertised, half of Canadian employers don’t bother to look at resumés from immigrant job candidates who have overseas education or work, according to a study done last year for the Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa think-tank.

«Despite the fact that immigrants are better and better skilled, they’re having more difficulty getting jobs,» says University of Toronto sociology professor Jeffrey Reitz.

He attributes this to a more rapidly rising skill level among native-born Canadians, whose university degrees and letters of reference are more familiar to the average employer.

«I had a doctor in my office last week from Iran. He was crying — because he’s a surgeon and he was working at McDonald’s,» says Jennie Brimicombe, who screens immigrants at ACCES, a Scarborough employment and counselling agency, for the mentor program.

The employment council is responsible for finding the individual and corporate mentors, while employment agencies like JobStart, ACCES and JVS screen immigrants to find a suitable match. To qualify, an immigrant must be in Canada less than three years, a professional educated outside the country, unemployed or in a «survival» job, and speak fluent English.

A total of 246 immigrant-mentor matches have been made since the orientation sessions began in February. (The goal is to make 1,000 matches in the first year, although mentors are in desperately short supply.) Forty immigrants, including Aaron Chaze, have found either part-time or full-time jobs in their field, says project manager Sangeeta Subramanian.

Chaze, who has been working now for several months, speaks highly of the program, but he also attributes his success to the preparations he and his wife made. «We spent two years planning our move. We did a lot of research and had a huge dossier on what Canadian life was like, what to expect, what not to expect,» he says.

«We also came well-prepared financially. We decided to take it easy and look for exactly the kind of work we wanted without having to take up run-of-the-mill short-term jobs.» Meanwhile Shah, who this night is joined by 10 other immigrants in a classroom at the Dufferin St. offices of the employment agency JobStart, is working several nights a week at a telemarketing firm to pay the bills. Also in the room are a chartered accountant, a transportation specialist, human resources professional, management engineer, chemical engineer and an IT expert. Some hold three degrees and speak two or three languages.

The mentors they are about to meet are in a classroom down the hall.

Matching is never done by age, gender or racial orientation, but strictly by profession. There are few engineers, despite the demand.

«The better the match, the more successful we find the experience is going to be,» says JobStart manager Rebecca McGregor, who runs the Toronto mentoring program.

On this evening in April, the groups meet separately and each is given a run-down on how to «work the relationship» to the immigrant’s advantage.

Soon the mentors are brought down the hall, introductions are made and the relationship begins.

Shah and Morley exchange greetings and chat a while. They agree to meet again in four weeks, on May 10. By then, Shah will have been here five months and still he will have no job offers in his field. He’s applied everywhere, he says, from 200 to 300 employment agencies and was offered one job, which only paid commission.

«It’s become a philosophy now for employers here: Canadian experience, Canadian experience. Wherever you go, Canadian experience. Some of the time we don’t even get a response,» he says bitterly.

Shah, who obtained his MBA in England, was willing to settle for a junior management position in the chemical industry. Now any industry will do. Morley appreciates the challenges he faces, and after their May 10 meeting she is optimistic she can help.

«He has a great personality and I went over his resumé with him today in great detail. I gave him some feedback on grammatical errors and little things I would notice as a hiring manager, so he’s going to rework it.»

She will also look into a program to help him with his English pronunciation.

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They’re meeting regularly now.

They met again on May 31, and once more on June 24, when Shah sat in on a branch managers’ meeting. Morley said he might want to think about taking the Canadian Securities Course, but he can’t decide if the financial world is his future. He asked if his email address could be printed in this story — [email protected] — because every bit helps.

It’s now six months since he arrived in Canada and Dhaval has had one or two face-to-face interviews. Nothing has panned out. «It’s very tough. I feel I’m wasting my time and skills,» he says. «But this is my situation now. I have to find a way …»