Immigration Canada

What do Canadian employers want?

Canadian employers often want you to have soft skills and hard skills.

Often, it is not enough to have hard skills, or technical skills. Canadian employers want to hire people who also have soft skills.

Soft Skills

Soft skills are sometimes called employability skills. They include:

Communication
Problem solving
Positive attitudes and behaviours
Adaptability
Working with others

Employers want every employee to have these skills. Someone who has these skills will be able to learn and grow in a job. These people can get along with their co-workers and are a long-term asset for the organization.

Hard Skills or Technical Skills

Each job type has its own set of skills, called hard skills. Hard skills are the technical skills you need to do a certain job. For example:

Using computer programs
Measuring and calculating
Analyzing data
Speaking a language
Operating a machine

Experience

Understanding labour market information can help you identify what kind of experience employers want.

How your professional qualifications are valued in Canada is very important. It can help you find work in your field. By finding out how your experience is valued, you will know if you need to do any academic upgrading or exams to get the same kind of work in Canada .

You might need to have your academic or professional credentials assessed. In regulated professions or trades, you cannot work in your field unless you have had your credentials and experience evaluated.

After you have assessed your skills, you need to be able to show employers that you have these skills. You can ask someone at a settlement agency or a community employment centre for help with your résumé and job search. You can find them in Services Near Me.

For More Information

Employability Skills Profile - A fact sheet with descriptions of critical skills, including personal management and teamwork skills.
Ontario Skills Passport - A website with clear descriptions of basic skills and work habits that employers want, and information about what skills and tasks are required for certain occupations.
JVS Career Voice - This blog for job seekers has information about career choices, finding a job, marketing yourself and more. You can submit questions. The blog posts are written by experts in employment.

Nine soft skills no immigrant should be without!

By Nick Noorani

Photo by Joyce Wong

Skilled immigrants often focus on improving technical skills after coming to Canada, and they are shocked when they are told they have “no Canadian experience.” I’ve realized that this albatross around immigrants’ necks is actually a vague way of saying: “You lack the soft skills I am looking for in an employee.”

I believe there are nine soft skills that no immigrant should be without:

1. Communication skills
Communication skills — both spoken and written — are critical for immigrants. I can’t stress enough how important it is for career success to be able to not only speak in English, but also write clearly and persuasively.

2. Local language skills
I still smile when I think back to my first job in Canada when I was asked to put my “John Hancock” on a courier document. As I looked at the courier, he said to me, “I mean your signature.” In a corporate environment, your language skills have to evolve to understand local phrases and business jargon.

3. Presentation skills
In a recent survey, senior managers rated the ability to make presentations as a top qualification. Now this could mean a formal presentation to clients or a more casual way of presenting yourself in meetings and with colleagues.

4. Small talk
Do you sense a theme here? Most of the soft skills I’ve mentioned so far all relate back to communicating. Water cooler chitchat is a part of corporate life. But be careful not to cross the line of what’s taboo.

5. Leadership and initiative
Staying invisible is why many immigrants are overlooked when it comes time for promotions. Take some initiative, share your ideas, ask questions and encourage others to collaborate as well!

6. Conflict resolution and negotiation
It is important to learn how to disagree with a colleague or even your boss without getting emotional about it! And if things go too far, learn to apologize.

7. Accepting constructive criticism
Constructive criticism is part of any learning curve. To accept criticism, understand that we are not perfect and learning is a continuous process, at work and in life.

8. Flexibility
Show your employer that you’re willing to learn and adapt. The labour market and economy are changing all the time, and we must change, too.

9. Business etiquette
Workplace customs and practices may be different in Canada than your homeland. Something as simple as calling your boss by his or her first name may seem odd to you, but it’s normal practice here.

There are many more soft skills, of course, but these nine are the ones that tend to get lost in translation. So let’s start reviewing these in more depth over the next few months and see where it takes us!

Nick Noorani is the founder and former publisher of Canadian Immigrant and co-author of Arrival Survival Canada.

Immigrants outperform mainstream populations in the US Canada and Australia, study says

QMI AGENCY

Second-generation Chinese and South Asian immigrants in the U.S., Canada, and Australia are more successful than third- and higher-generation whites, a University of Toronto study says.

Sociology professor Jeffrey G. Reitz and PhD candidate Naoko Hawkins and Heather Zhang from McGill University examined survey and census data to compare the achievements of immigrants and their children.
Their conclusion appears in the journal, Social Science Research.

“From a Canadian perspective, the findings are a welcome indication that the children of immigrants are doing well,” Reitz says on the U of T's site. “However, those who have attributed such success to distinctive Canadian integration policies such as multiculturalism will find their views refuted by the fact that similar success is experienced by the children of similar immigrants in the United States and Australia.”

Data from previous research showed that immigrants in the U.S., Canada, and Australia have varied degrees of success due to each country’s different educational and labour market institutions, Reitz said.
For instance, in the U.S., Chinese immigrants often have fewer years of education than the mainstream population; in Australia, they have more.

However, Reitz, Hawkins, and Zhang discovered in their study that these cross-national differences in immigrant success are largely eliminated for the second generation, many of whom outperform the mainstream population. For example, in all three countries, second-generation whites, Afro-Caribbeans, Chinese, South Asians, and other Asians all have, on average, more education than higher-generation whites of the same age.

“The Chinese second generation in particular is much more educated,” Reitz said. “In the U.S., this group’s average number of years of education is about 15% above that of the mainstream population.
In Canada, this average is 20% higher than the mainstream’s; in Australia it is 17% higher.”

The team says that in all three countries, the number of second-generation Chinese and South Asians who work in managerial and professional occupations is nearly double that of the mainstream population of the same age.

“These findings raise questions about why inheritance of social class does not apply to immigrants in these countries in the same way that it does to the mainstream population,” said Reitz. “The answer may lie in the immigrant parents’ high education levels: despite the economic hardship they experience, many immigrants impart the value of education to their children, which in turn helps ensure their employment success," Reitz said.