Federal, Provincial and Territorial Governments Cooperate to Speed Up Foreign Qualification Assessment and Recognition for Skilled Newcomers

OTTAWA, ONTARIO, Mar 12, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- Governments are working in partnership to help internationally trained professionals find work in their fields through a national framework to improve the recognition of foreign qualifications.

Federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for the labour market announced today, through the Forum of Labour Market Ministers (FLMM), the release of a progress report on the implementation of the Pan-Canadian Framework for the Assessment and Recognition of Foreign Qualifications(1). All governments are working towards the common goal of ensuring that foreign qualifications are assessed and recognized in a fair, consistent, transparent and timely manner. This collective effort will help internationally trained professionals put their knowledge, skills and experience to work sooner in communities across the country.

"Attracting and retaining the best international talent to address existing and future labour market challenges is critical to Canada's long-term economic success," said the Honourable Diane Finley, Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development and Co-Chair of the FLMM. "For Canada to achieve its economic potential, internationally trained professionals must have the opportunity to find work that best suits their skills and training. That's why we are improving foreign qualification recognition so that these skilled workers can find jobs in their fields faster."

Through the Framework and other initiatives, federal, provincial and territorial governments are working to improve the assessment and recognition of foreign qualifications and to better integrate internationally trained professionals into the job market.

The FLMM's progress report highlights that the first eight target occupations outlined in the Framework, including engineers and registered nurses, meet the one-year commitment to timely service in all Canadian jurisdictions. This means that internationally trained professionals will be advised within one year as to how their qualifications compare to the Canadian standard.

"I am proud of the progress we have made to date on improving foreign qualification recognition for internationally trained professionals," said the Honourable Dave Hancock, Minister of Human Services, Government of Alberta, and Co-Chair of the FLMM. "Streamlining foreign qualification recognition is a win-win for both governments and newcomers to Canada. Ensuring immigrants to Canada can work to their full potential in their chosen profession is essential for our future economic success and international competitiveness."

Governments are now working with stakeholders to improve foreign qualification recognition for an additional six target occupations, including physicians and dentists.

The implementation of the Framework has been made possible through the collaboration of federal, provincial and territorial governments, and through consultations with key partners that support specific actions to promote continuous improvement to the way that internationally trained professionals' qualifications are assessed and recognized in each of the first set of target occupations.

The FLMM also recognized the important role that federal, provincial and territorial ministries of immigration and health play in implementing the Framework.

The Framework is one example of the collaborative approach governments have taken to respond to current and future labour market challenges, such as skills shortages in key areas of the economy, while creating opportunities for all Canadians to contribute to the labour force.

The Framework is available on the Human Resources and Skills Development Canada website at http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/workplaceskills/publications/fcr/pcf.shtml .

The progress report on the Pan-Canadian Framework for the Assessment and Recognition of Foreign Qualifications is available online at http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/workplaceskills/publications/fcr/2010/fcr.shtml .

This news release is available in alternative formats upon request.

Backgrounder

The Forum of Labour Market Ministers (FLMM) was established in 1983 as an intergovernmental forum to strengthen cooperation and strategic thinking on the labour market priorities of the provinces, the territories and Canada.

The FLMM was mandated to develop the Pan-Canadian Framework for the Assessment and Recognition of Foreign Qualifications, announced in November 2009. The Framework represents a new vision, guiding principles of fairness, transparency, timeliness and consistency and desired outcomes for improving foreign qualification recognition for internationally trained professionals in Canada.

Through the Economic Action Plan, the Government of Canada invested $50 million to work with the provinces and territories and other partners, such as regulatory authorities and post-secondary institutions, to address barriers to foreign qualification recognition. The provinces and territories are also investing in this work.

The following are the first set of target occupations in the Framework:

        
        --  architects
        --  engineers
        --  financial auditors and accountants, including chartered accountants,
            certified general accountants and certified management accountants
        --  medical laboratory technologists
        --  occupational therapists
        --  pharmacists
        --  physiotherapists
        --  registered nurses

The next set of target occupations in the Framework are as follows:

        
        --  dentists
        --  engineering technicians
        --  licensed practical nurses
        --  medical radiation technologists
        --  physicians
        --  teachers (K-12)

Internationally trained professionals must submit all fees and relevant documents necessary to process their applications. They may also be advised of additional requirements or may be directed to alternative occupations that would benefit from their skills and experience.

(1) While the Quebec government has not endorsed the Framework, it supports its principles and agrees to share reports already made public to its citizens, notably those tabled at the National Assembly.

        
        Contacts:
        Alyson Queen
        Director of Communications
        Office of Minister Finley
        819-994-2482
        
        Media Relations Office
        Human Resources and Skills Development Canada
        819-994-5559
        
        Sonia Sinha
        Public Affairs Officer
        Ministry of Human Services
        Government of Alberta
        780-427-2934

SOURCE: Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and Forum of Labour Market Ministers

Canada wisely using resource riches to feed education

Much ink has been spilled of late on Canada’s growing economic divide, as western provinces benefit most from high global prices for commodities like oil and potash, while manufacturers in Ontario and Quebec are hamstrung by the sky-high currency that comes with those.

In Central Canada, some economists worry that a variation of the dreaded “Dutch disease” may be settling in, where the energy-fuelled loonie makes it hard for exporters of anything else to make a go in foreign markets, and threatens to depress employment in many export-dependent industries for years, if not decades.

But the notion that too many of Canada’s eggs are being put into the resource basket – laid bare as Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Alberta Premier Alison Redford duked it out over Canada’s “petro dollar” and its impact on manufacturers – is hardly black and white. For example, as Economy Lab blogger Stephen Gordon (a Laval University professor) points out, the resource boom from 2002 to 2008 pushed unemployment down across the country, offsetting losses in manufacturing and, before the financial crisis anyway, nudging up wages even in Ontario.

Still, it’s clear that over time, the businesses in Central Canada that survive and profit will be the ones that figure out how to piggyback on gains in the resource sector, finding ways to ensure they are part of the resource supply chain and producing goods that are useful to that industry, on top of high-value products for customers around the world.

A crucial component for making this work will be an adaptable, highly educated and highly skilled work force that can adapt quickly to fill a variety of needs.

According to a new study from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, released Monday, Canada is in a better position than most to figure out how to thrive over the long haul because it is one of the few resource-rich nations on the planet where education and skills have not been shortchanged.

Canada, Australia and Norway, the OECD says, outperform the vast majority of oil-producing nations in learning outcomes at schools. In fact, those three countries were the exceptions in a group of 65 that the OECD looked at, which found a “significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their school population.”

In other words, Canada is among a select group of countries positioned to prosper even some time way down the road, when finite resources like oil start to become less important to the economy.

“Exceptions such as Canada, Australia and Norway, that are rich of natural resources but still score well on PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), have all established deliberate policies of saving these resource rents, and not just consuming them,” said Andreas Schleicher, deputy director and special adviser on education to the OECD secretary-general. “Today’s learning outcomes at school, in turn, are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.”

Countries with few natural resources – like Israel, Finland, Singapore and Japan – have high education scores, the OECD notes, “at least in part because the public at large has understood the country must live by its knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education.”

In general, countries where this is the opposite tend to be in the developing world. However, Mr. Schleicher notes that there is a message in the study for struggling developed countries, too, whether they’re endowed with resources or not.

“Without sufficient investment in skills, people languish on the margins of society, technological progress does not translate into productivity growth, and countries can no longer compete in an increasingly knowledge-based global economy,” he said. “The toxic co-existence of high unemployment and skills shortages in many countries today illustrates that producing more of the same graduates is not the answer.”

Indeed, business leaders in Canada argue that a greater national emphasis on skills and training in the so-called “technical trades” – and perhaps a bit less emphasis on liberal-arts degrees that are becoming harder to translate into jobs – is desperately needed. This, they say, could go a long way toward matching the labour needs of resource companies and the employment needs of laid-off factory workers, while ensuring Canada can capitalize on new opportunities in emerging markets.

Meanwhile, Statistics Canada on Monday released a short study on labour productivity that supports the notion Canada has been careful to not approach its resources as a never-ending cash cow that the country can coast on indefinitely. The study found that from 1997 to 2010, gains in productivity were primarily driven by “capital intensity” – investments in plant, machinery and equipment. Nonetheless, Statscan said, every province except British Columbia saw gains come from investments in “human capital,” too, which refers to the amount invested in educating workers and boosting their skill sets.

Western Canadian employers court the Irish

SEAN SILCOFF

OTTAWA— From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

Faced with a massive skills shortage and a surge of job openings, Western Canadian employers are looking to an old source for new workers: hard-up Ireland.

This week, two delegations of employers – one from Saskatchewan led by Premier Brad Wall, the other headed by British Columbia and Alberta construction industry representatives – are making a push to entice Irish citizens to leave their economically devastated country and come to Canada, as the ancestors of more than one in eight Canadians did generations earlier.

“We have a construction boom; they have a bust,” said Abigail Fulton, vice-president of the British Columbia Construction Association, whose 11-member delegation is meeting with Irish government, industry and union representatives in Dublin this week. The meetings, she said, are intended “to lay groundwork and develop an inventory of people who are looking for work” – then match the names to companies looking to fill more than 100,000 construction jobs expected to open up in B.C. and Alberta in the next five years.

Like the Alberta-B.C. delegation, the Saskatchewan group, which includes 27 employers, has a big presence at the Working Abroad job fair in Dublin this weekend, giving Canadian exhibitors close to 40 per cent of the booths. The Saskatchewan government has set up a website that greets potential Irish emigrants with the message “Welcome to your future” and hundreds of job postings. The province is even sending immigration officials to help applicants speed the process of moving to Saskatchewan, while Mr. Wall will greet job seekers on Saturday.

“They’re pushing it really hard,” said Chris Willis, a Canadian immigration consultant based in Hudson Heights, Que., who has attended the twice-annual job fair for the past six years. “This time it’s very much a Canadian-focused show.”

Among the exhibitors is Kevin Dahl, co-owner of Nipawin, Sask.-based K&R Contracting, which builds giant metal storage bins attached to grain elevators across the Prairie provinces and has had trouble holding on to employees. “This past year we needed 15 to 20 and couldn’t get any more than 12,” he said. “We’d hire a bunch of guys and they’d just disappear. There’s so much work in Saskatchewan that if you have a bad day, you can start 10 other jobs tomorrow.” He’s hoping to hire up to 10 metal workers this weekend.

With its steady economy, common language, similar training and work standards – not to mention shared history – Canada is one of a handful a popular destinations for Irish workers.

Moreover, the Irish economy holds few opportunities. Four years after the bursting of its property bubble – and its reputation as one of the strongest economies in the world – Ireland’s unemployment rate is stuck at 14.2 per cent, and the number of construction jobs is down more than 60 per cent from its peak in 2007. Construction activity is expected to sag to €6.5-billion ($8.7-billion) this year, one-sixth its level in 2007. “There’s not a huge amount of light at the end of the tunnel at the moment,” said Jimmy Healy, spokesman for Ireland’s Construction Industry Federation.

As a result, people are leaving the country of 4.6 million people in droves. In the year ending April, 2011, 40,200 Irish nationals emigrated, up 45 per cent from the same period a year earlier and triple the level three years earlier, according to the Irish Central Statistics Office.

Meanwhile, Citizenship and Immigration Canada reports 3,729 temporary foreign workers entered the country from Ireland in 2010 – up 25.7 per cent from the year before – either through the country’s one-year “working holiday” program for those under age 35 or after obtaining four-year permits under the temporary foreign workers program through their Canadian employers.

Ms. Fulton said her group had met with a warm reception so far. “They see this as a partnership more than us coming over and snagging all their workers. They want their workers to find jobs and return when their economy improves.”

Young leading exodus from lacklustre Canadian labour market

TAVIA GRANT

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

An eight-month stretch of meagre job creation is driving more Canadians out of the labour force, especially the young.

The country’s jobless rate fell two notches to 7.4 per cent in February, but that was because fewer people were looking for work, rather than any pickup in the labour market, Statistics Canada said Friday. The country’s labour participation rate has ebbed to its lowest level in a decade.

Young people are leading the exodus. Their jobless rate hit 14.7 per cent last month – its highest level since October, 2010 – amid five straight months of employment declines. Poor prospects mean almost 200,000 of them have left the labour force since the recession began. The youth participation rate has tumbled to a 16-month low and is approaching 1995 levels.

“This is a really significant issue,” said Francis Fong, an economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank who wrote a paper this week predicting the youth jobs market will remain tough for years to come.

That’s in part because older workers are staying on the job. Many are delaying retirement – for both voluntary and involuntary reasons – which means fewer new jobs are opening up. Of those that do, young people must now compete with more experienced workers.

“This generation of younger workers are our future labour force … and they are facing some pretty unique pressures that other generations didn’t have to go through,” Mr. Fong said.

He said the economic consequences will include muted consumer spending among the young, heavy debt loads and delayed home buying.

Among the university crowd, the mood is one of a deep sense of frustration, said Sara Taddio, a musician who is studying public relations at McGill University. She said her job applications have gone unacknowledged.

“I’m 22, I have the technical tools and enough drive and ambition – I just want to get my life started,” she said, adding that most employers are opting for more-experienced candidates.

Canada’s economy shed 2,800 jobs in February, the second month in a row of little change. The public sector dropped 13,400 positions, and is expected to fall further this year. Private-sector employment slipped by 1,700, while self-employment – often seen as lower-paying positions – rose by 12,300.

It wasn’t just young people who left the work force; other demographic groups exited the labour market as well. Canada’s participation rate fell to 66.5 per cent last month, the lowest since April, 2002.

The slide “is a sign of serious disengagement from the formal economy,” said Jim Stanford, economist at the Canadian Auto Workers.

Statscan’s broadest measure of unemployment is the so-called R8, which includes discouraged workers and those working part-time who would rather have a full-time job; that measure stood at is 11.4 per cent in February, a slight improvement from 11.7 per cent a year earlier.

The federal budget on March 29 is expected to show cost cutting and possible public-service layoffs as part of its plan to trim the deficit.

Job creation remains a focus, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters in Toronto on Friday. “We will not keep our eye off the ball and there will be a lot of measures in the budget to create jobs and to get us on a long-term, sustainable track.”

That may not be easy. Private sector employers may rethink their hiring spree of the first half of 2011, and instead focus on boosting productivity, while public sector employment – a key source of growth in recent years – will decline outright, predicts Scotia Capital economist Derek Holt.

The pace of job creation this year will be half the rate of 2011, at 11,000 jobs or less a month, he believes.

With files from reporter Kelly Grant in Toronto.

Why can’t I get Canadian companies to take my U.S. experience seriously?

EILEEN CHADNICK

Globe and Mail Update

The question

I was relocated to Canada from the U.S. by the consultant firm I worked for. The project fell through and I was out of a job but I decided to stay in Canada (Toronto) to look for a new job at a Canadian bank. Even after I had obtained permanent residency status I was told I would have to take “several steps down the corporate ladder” because I had little Canadian experience. I had 10 years of banking experience in the U.S. and an MBA. I’ve sat in the HR offices of some of the Big Five banks and I am led to wonder how can someone get past that view that experience outside of Canada isn’t relevant here? How can you convince a corporation to look at you seriously even though your lengthy experience isn’t from Canada? Can you get past that or do you have to accept that you have to start near the bottom again?

The answer

I hear your frustration and I am sure you have a lot of worthy skills and experience from your lengthy experience in the U.S. However, while an MBA and 10 years of experience is impressive, what will matter most is what you achieved, learned, and contributed within that experience and how that is relevant to the Canadian market.

Keep in mind, there is nothing generic about banking. One size doesn’t fit all. The finance sector is a vast industry. For instance, a career in banking might encompass roles within retail banking, lending, investment management, tax and estate planning, wealth management, private banking, global banking, merchant banking, card services – and so much more. Deep experience in one area may or may not be transferrable to another area. As well, in any of these areas the Canadian market can differ greatly from the U.S from a regulatory, business, operations and marketing perspective.

To be taken seriously, your “pitch” (résumé, interviews) has to immediately convey that you have enough of the relevant experience and leadership attributes to be considered for a senior role. If the 10-year U.S. experience isn’t enough to break through to employers, what would a more compelling narrative look like? I encourage you rethink your approach (your résumé and profile; and to whom and how are pitching your candidacy). Your pitch may need to be more focused and tailored to the opportunities you are seeking.

Here are some questions to ask yourself that will help you reflect and further refine your job search with more focus.

• Sectors: What sectors within the banking and finance industry do I bring the most experience and how closely aligned is my experience with the Canadian market? What would I need to do and learn to close that gap if I want to work in any particular finance sector in the Canadian market?

• Roles: What kinds of roles best suit my strengths, aspirations, experience? Am I qualified to pursue a banking career that involves responsibility in marketing, operations, sales, project management or other areas?

• Strengths: When I consider my accomplishments and my “best moments” in my career, what are the strengths and attributes that really showed up? How can I tailor my search to find roles and environments that best match my strengths, and to what extent am I communicating these strengths and traits in my résumé and interview conversations?

• Values and approach: What values inform my preferred approach at work? Am I known to be a collaborator? Relationship builder? Innovator? People developer? Or do I prefer to fly solo? In what environments do I most thrive – entrepreneurial or corporate?

• Expand the search: Where else can I explore career opportunities beyond the banks? While the banks are an excellent avenue to explore – what other organizations may offer appropriate career opportunities? Explore alternatives such as credit unions, financial planning firms, investment companies, and mutual fund companies. Depending on your skills and interest, you may even think out of the box and consider service agencies to the financial sector, such as marketing or consulting firms.

• Network: Who can I talk to within the industry to learn more? How can I ramp up my networking so that I can engage in conversations with the right people to learn more about the industry and potential opportunities?

• Flexibility: How badly do I need to ensure my first job in Canada is a senior level role? What value might there be in accepting a less senior role in an organization that fits with my aspirations and provides a foot in the door?

Put it all together and invest the effort: After engaging in the above reflections, you should be in a better position to refresh your résumé and present your value proposition more meaningfully.

There’s no way around it – job seeking calls for a lot of effort. Regardless of one’s experience, every job seeker must fine-tune their personal marketing; develop a meaningful networking plan; research and tailor their search to appropriate opportunities; think inside and outside the box; and hone interview skills.

Don’t give up. But do take yourself and the job search effort more seriously so that you can be taken more seriously as well.

Eileen Chadnick is a career coach and principal of Big Cheese Coaching in Toronto.

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