Nick Noorani Website

For many newcomers to Canada, learning English or French is just the first hurdle.

To secure their future in their new land, they need to become fluent in another vernacular — the language of the workplace.

When the boss greets you by your first name, do you respond in kind?

If you choose the standard voice mail greeting over a personalized one, what kind of message does that send?

Is this Roberto Luongo who is mentioned so often across the desks a statesman or a deity?

No matter your qualifications, fail to understand the nuances of this language and you could have trouble finding and keeping a job, in your field or otherwise.

One set of immigrants with backgrounds in the key sector of information technology recently emerged from a ceremony in Ottawa with the right to tell interviewers: “I speak office.”

They’ve learned about report-writing, telephone skills, even table etiquette. They’ve been grilled in mock interviews and served placements in real workplaces.

But their most important acquisition could be a new attitude.

“For most of them, it’s self-confidence,” says organizer Ying Xie.

The course is administered by the Ottawa Chinese Community Service Centre, where Xie is employment support program director, but is open to all nationalities. Since its start in 2008, it has helped newcomers from Brazil to Liberia to the Asian subcontinent in their search for a career footing in Canada.

These workers must compete for jobs with applicants who have years of Canadian experience. And because the security clearance required for government jobs can take years for immigrants to obtain, their options are fewer.

Yet IT is at the heart of the “knowledge economy” meant to supplant a Canadian manufacturing sector under growing global pressure. And with Canada and other western countries hoping skilled immigrants will take over the swivel chairs vacated by retiring boomers, demand for such workers is expected to rise.

Future prospects, however, won’t pay the rent for Mohamed Hamail and Gang Zhang, two participants in the career-bridging program. Both are on work placements at Ottawa’s Titus Labs, where they hope to demonstrate skills that could earn them permanent jobs.

Both hold master’s degrees and both worked for major companies, Hamail in Egypt and Zhang in China. And both say their biggest surprise is the informal atmosphere at Titus, which produces security and compliance software for e-mail and documents.

“The environment here is more loose, more friendly between colleagues. There’s more chance for an employee to develop himself, to bring out ideas,” says Zhang, who came to Ottawa with his wife on Christmas Day 2008 to escape Shanghai’s pollution and raise a family. They have a six-month-old son.

Hamail, 38, with a science background, is puzzled by the apparent tendency of interviewers to rely on assumptions about foreign workers instead of reviewing their abilities objectively. Married and with six-year-old twin boys, his goal is to persuade an employer “to give me a chance to transfer my logic, my skills to different fields.”

Adds Zhang, 35: “The most difficulty is in getting an interview.”

The placements were arranged by Regi Roy, Titus’s vice-president of product development. Roy, who came to Canada from India in 1998, also helps by coaching the students on interview skills. But as a representative of a small company — Titus began with four employees in 2005 and has 36 today — he can understand both sides of the hiring dilemma.

“To get the right fit is sometimes challenging,” he says.

Roy notes that federal subsidies are available to companies that hire recent graduates, and suggests a similar program for immigrants would help both newcomers and employers.

Federal and Ontario government money support the career-bridge program. There are no fees for participants, who must be Canadian citizens, convention refugees or hold permanent resident status, but no wages, either, unless organizers can find them a paid placement at one of the 50 small-and medium-sized employers they work with.

Some 240 newcomers have gone through the 12-week course, which has spawned a similar program for internationally trained accounting professionals. Applicants need to pass an entrance interview and must already be proficient in English.

The federal government is woefully unprepared to deal with the looming shortage of skilled labour, and business leaders and government need to get their heads out of the sand before it’s too late, business leaders were told recently.

The warning came from Carleton University professor Linda Duxbury, and from Rosemarie Leclair, CEO of Hydro Ottawa, during a two-day leadership summit. The summit brought business leaders and senior managers from the public sector together to learn about recruiting and retaining skilled immigrants.

While the City of Ottawa predicts that immigrants will be needed if every new job is to be filled after 2011, a large proportion of newcomers are unable to find work. Of the immigrants who join the Ottawa workforce every year, approximately 83 per cent have a university degree, but the unemployment rate among recent immigrants is eight per cent higher than for non-immigrants. Among those who have jobs, more than half are not working in their intended field.

Duxbury, professor of organizational health at Carleton’s Sprott School of Business, warned this week of a “profound disconnect,” arguing that employers haven’t caught up to the fact that simple demographics are propelling them rapidly from a buyer’s market to a seller’s market. “We have simply not procreated in sufficient numbers to sustain our labour force,” said Duxbury. “For every two people retiring, there is only one person in the pipeline to replace them.”

Those retirees are workaholic baby-boomers, Duxbury said. The young people coming into the job market reject that generational addiction to long hours and poor work-life balance, “so really, we’re going to need three people to replace two.”

Duxbury argued that the attitude in business and in the public sector has long been that newcomers must adapt to the Canadian workplace. Now, says Duxbury, employers who hope to thrive will have to turn the Golden Rule on its head.

“It used to be, ‘treat people the way you want to be treated’,” said Duxbury. “But diversity means ‘treat people the way they want to be treated’ ” — see beyond cultural differences to find what they have to offer, and don’t be afraid to make adjustments to the way you work.

A Scotiabank senior personal banking officer told her tale of struggling to find work. A trained banker with a master’s degree from Carleton University, Ghanaian immigrant Alberta Lawson spent four years and almost all her savings on the search, until she attended a networking event a year ago, and met a Scotiabank recruiter who “really listened to me, and saw what I could do for the company.” Lawson was hired for a position at a level higher than what she initially applied for, and now works at the bank.

Adjusting the way employers recruit and retain immigrant talent “isn’t the nice thing to do, it’s the only thing to do,” said Leclair.

New Canadian research suggests that, contrary to previous thinking, rising diversity doesn’t erode trust and social ties — and in some cases it might enhance them.

The study looks at how diversity and city size affect social capital, a sociological concept that refers to the connections between people and networks — ties that help people fit in and find jobs and places to live.

The findings fly in the face of previous research that suggested social capital declines as multiculturalism and visible minority populations increase, and they spell good news for a nation facing a future of unprecedented diversity, says Ravi Pendakur, an associate professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa and co-author of the study.

“If what they’re arguing is that as diversity goes up, all those things associated with social capital go down, Canada is in trouble because we have no choice but to see greater and greater diversity,” he says. “A lot of the work in the past has really suggested a negative impact on social capital based on minority status. We’re not finding that.”

Last month, Statistics Canada released projections suggesting that by 2031, at least one in four people in this country will have been born elsewhere and nearly one in three people will be visible minorities.

Researchers have mostly focused on diversity and social capital on the United States and concluded that as diversity increases, trust and social connections decline, Pendakur says. But based on his own research, he believes the effects of multiculturalism were masked by the realities of big-city life.

People who live in large cities teeming with strangers are less trusting than those in small towns, he says, and big Canadian cities are where the diversity is. Previous research in the field didn’t separate the city characteristics from the effects of diversity, he says, but when he did so in this study, he found the impact of multiculturalism on social capital is minimal — and sometimes positive.

Pendakur’s study looked at three aspects of social capital: trust, measured by asking people questions such as how likely they think it is that a lost wallet would be returned to them; interaction, or the frequency of contact with family, friends and neighbours; and participation, or membership in organizations and clubs.

He found that those of French, East Asian and Latin American background are least trusting, and people of Southern European, South Asian, Chinese and aboriginal origin are less likely to participate in groups. But overall, the differences were small once he took into account the effects of city size, Pendakur says, and he found that a bigger visible minority population means more interaction among citizens.

The study was released by Metropolis British Columbia, an immigration and diversity research centre.