Post-graduate degree-holders new to Canada have a tough time entering managerial occupations
At the height of his career, Muneeb Fazili took charge of the financial controls system of the Faysal Bank of Bahrain. He handled all communications with external auditors, submitted reports to the central bank and drew up budgets. In essence, he accounted for $1.7 billion in funds under the bank’s management.
Despite their very comfortable lifestyle — free housing, company-paid vacations, maid services — Fazili and his wife decided to head for Canada where they wanted to raise a family. Once here, however, all his experience in managing an international staff and complying with accounting rules of countries as varied as Switzerland, Bangladesh and Pakistan seemed to amount to nothing.
To translate his chartered accountancy, obtained in India, into an Ontario designation, he had to first find work in public accounting and then take an exam. The exam he could handle — “I could take it the next day,” said Fazili. But for nine months, he sent out resumes to countless accounting firms, to no avail.
“People just weren’t interested to speak to me or to see me. I think people just saw it as an immigrant’s resume and that was it,” said Fazili.
And after months watching the savings dwindle, Fazili found himself thinking, “Oh God, I need to think about this again. Do I need to go back?”
It’s often held that when a doctor from India arrives in Canada only to end up driving a taxi, it’s because professional regulatory bodies here discount the doctor’s credentials and experiences from abroad.
According to this line of thinking, highly skilled immigrants who arrive not with specialized training but with managerial experience should have an easier time.
After all, can’t skills in people management, motivational strategies and leadership be put to use in a Canadian workplace, even if they were acquired elsewhere?
The fact is, post-graduate degree-holders who are new to Canada have a harder time entering managerial occupations than the regulated professions, as a University of Toronto study released in February shows.
The study, Occupational Dimensions of Immigrant Credentials Assessment, conducted by sociology professor Jeffery Reitz, is based on Statistics Canada numbers.
The difficulties are even greater for managers outside the knowledge industries, said Reitz, who added he was surprised by his findings.
He speculated that in the regulated professions, where training is closely linked to the requirements of the job, employers have more opportunities to clearly evaluate foreign credentials as they come across them. They can rely on credential assessment by professional regulatory bodies, and then determine what further training is needed.
When it comes to management, however, the training criteria are less clear, said Reitz.
“Employers may want university graduates but they don’t have very clearly spelled out rationales for why that is. So they may be less attached to investigating qualifications with which they’re not familiar.”
Discrimination may be a factor, added Reitz. The numbers showed women immigrants experience greater barriers to management jobs than men, as do immigrants of racial minorities.
He added that although immigrants typically accept jobs beneath their level, people with managerial qualifications tend to suffer a greater downfall.
This descent is even harder on morale for people in managerial occupations, who have a higher expectation of employability. As Fazili said, “you’re processing immigration papers and you get a certain number of points for your qualifications or education. That gives you an impression that your skill set is needed in Canada.”
Despite the increased difficulty for credentialed immigrants to enter managerial occupations, particularly outside the knowledge industries, public debate around the discounting of immigrants’ skills has centred on reforming bureaucratic procedures imposed by professional regulatory bodies.
“If we focus all our attention on the regulated professions, we may never solve a big part of the problem of the discounting of qualifications,” said Reitz. “Down the road, we may find the overall problem of discounting of qualifications is still stubbornly there.”
Lionel Laroche, vice-president of cross-cultural and relocation services at Toronto-based CPI/Hazel & Associates, said immigrant managers are shut out of the job market because managing people in India or China is very different from managing people in Canada.
If a company needed a drawing of a horse, as an example, a manager with Scandinavian experience would tend to simply tell his employee to draw a picture of a horse, said Laroche. A Canadian manager would do a rough sketch and tell his employee to draw up something like it. And a manager from China or Korea would tend to give out a paint-by-the-number picture for the employee to fill in.
These habits are ingrained, said Laroche. “We learn management from our public schools, from our university professors, from our parents, from our summer jobs,” said Laroche. In fact, employers are so wary of incompatible management styles that Laroche would counsel immigrant job seekers to hide their management experience.
“If someone has a PhD or management experience from abroad, I would tell them to leave in the PhDs but leave out the management experience.”
Descending many rungs on the corporate ladder may be the only way newcomers get their foot in the door. But once in, said Laroche, immigrants stand a chance of being able to work their way back into management positions.
“It may take 10 to 15 years, but at that point, their previous managerial experience becomes very valuable to an organization. That’s because they now know how to manage Canadians as well as how to manage back in their home countries,” said Laroche.
“They become global managers, and are able to manage in a variety of environments. They have a global perspective, and they would be ideal for international ventures.”
What this time lag means, stressed Laroche, is organizations have to start developing training strategies to prepare immigrant managers for the managerial roles.
With the expected exodus of baby boomers from the workforce in the next decade or so, the workforce will become more diverse. This shift means management ranks will have to be filled as older executives and managers retire.
Employers that want to harness the managerial skills of newcomers should think about building on-the-job management training, suggested Laroche. To play it safe, an employer can start slow and test out an immigrant manager’s supervisory skills by assigning a minimum of subordinates at the beginning.
At SpeakWell, a Toronto-based language and communication training company, director Jayne Edmonds said training for immigrant managers should incorporate leadership training with training in communications as well as English-as-a-second-language. Newcomers, even those who have a good grasp of English, may not be confident in their use of nuanced communication techniques that lend them authority and credibility, she said.
At StaffLink Solutions, president Tim Collins recommends that companies use mentoring programs to develop immigrant staff. Collins, who hired Fazili as a part-time accountant and has since made him director of finance, sees Fazili as a mutual mentor.
“I’ve learned a lot from him and he has learned a lot from me. The real life experiences that a lot of these people have can make a company much, much more successful, but making companies aware of this is a challenge,” said Collins.
Employers have to get rid of the mindset that management meetings would go smoother if everybody around the table is the same. Diversity in the workforce allows for diversity in ideas and innovations, said Collins.
“And adaptability is a huge factor. People have more abilities because they have been able to adapt to new cultures. When CEOs stress out about getting the right managers, the thing they have to realize is they have a huge candidate pool that they’re not drawing from.”
Despite their very comfortable lifestyle — free housing, company-paid vacations, maid services — Fazili and his wife decided to head for Canada where they wanted to raise a family. Once here, however, all his experience in managing an international staff and complying with accounting rules of countries as varied as Switzerland, Bangladesh and Pakistan seemed to amount to nothing.
To translate his chartered accountancy, obtained in India, into an Ontario designation, he had to first find work in public accounting and then take an exam. The exam he could handle — “I could take it the next day,” said Fazili. But for nine months, he sent out resumes to countless accounting firms, to no avail.
“People just weren’t interested to speak to me or to see me. I think people just saw it as an immigrant’s resume and that was it,” said Fazili.
And after months watching the savings dwindle, Fazili found himself thinking, “Oh God, I need to think about this again. Do I need to go back?”
It’s often held that when a doctor from India arrives in Canada only to end up driving a taxi, it’s because professional regulatory bodies here discount the doctor’s credentials and experiences from abroad.
According to this line of thinking, highly skilled immigrants who arrive not with specialized training but with managerial experience should have an easier time.
After all, can’t skills in people management, motivational strategies and leadership be put to use in a Canadian workplace, even if they were acquired elsewhere?
The fact is, post-graduate degree-holders who are new to Canada have a harder time entering managerial occupations than the regulated professions, as a University of Toronto study released in February shows.
The study, Occupational Dimensions of Immigrant Credentials Assessment, conducted by sociology professor Jeffery Reitz, is based on Statistics Canada numbers.
The difficulties are even greater for managers outside the knowledge industries, said Reitz, who added he was surprised by his findings.
He speculated that in the regulated professions, where training is closely linked to the requirements of the job, employers have more opportunities to clearly evaluate foreign credentials as they come across them. They can rely on credential assessment by professional regulatory bodies, and then determine what further training is needed.
When it comes to management, however, the training criteria are less clear, said Reitz.
“Employers may want university graduates but they don’t have very clearly spelled out rationales for why that is. So they may be less attached to investigating qualifications with which they’re not familiar.”
Discrimination may be a factor, added Reitz. The numbers showed women immigrants experience greater barriers to management jobs than men, as do immigrants of racial minorities.
He added that although immigrants typically accept jobs beneath their level, people with managerial qualifications tend to suffer a greater downfall.
This descent is even harder on morale for people in managerial occupations, who have a higher expectation of employability. As Fazili said, “you’re processing immigration papers and you get a certain number of points for your qualifications or education. That gives you an impression that your skill set is needed in Canada.”
Despite the increased difficulty for credentialed immigrants to enter managerial occupations, particularly outside the knowledge industries, public debate around the discounting of immigrants’ skills has centred on reforming bureaucratic procedures imposed by professional regulatory bodies.
“If we focus all our attention on the regulated professions, we may never solve a big part of the problem of the discounting of qualifications,” said Reitz. “Down the road, we may find the overall problem of discounting of qualifications is still stubbornly there.”
Lionel Laroche, vice-president of cross-cultural and relocation services at Toronto-based CPI/Hazel & Associates, said immigrant managers are shut out of the job market because managing people in India or China is very different from managing people in Canada.
If a company needed a drawing of a horse, as an example, a manager with Scandinavian experience would tend to simply tell his employee to draw a picture of a horse, said Laroche. A Canadian manager would do a rough sketch and tell his employee to draw up something like it. And a manager from China or Korea would tend to give out a paint-by-the-number picture for the employee to fill in.
These habits are ingrained, said Laroche. “We learn management from our public schools, from our university professors, from our parents, from our summer jobs,” said Laroche. In fact, employers are so wary of incompatible management styles that Laroche would counsel immigrant job seekers to hide their management experience.
“If someone has a PhD or management experience from abroad, I would tell them to leave in the PhDs but leave out the management experience.”
Descending many rungs on the corporate ladder may be the only way newcomers get their foot in the door. But once in, said Laroche, immigrants stand a chance of being able to work their way back into management positions.
“It may take 10 to 15 years, but at that point, their previous managerial experience becomes very valuable to an organization. That’s because they now know how to manage Canadians as well as how to manage back in their home countries,” said Laroche.
“They become global managers, and are able to manage in a variety of environments. They have a global perspective, and they would be ideal for international ventures.”
What this time lag means, stressed Laroche, is organizations have to start developing training strategies to prepare immigrant managers for the managerial roles.
With the expected exodus of baby boomers from the workforce in the next decade or so, the workforce will become more diverse. This shift means management ranks will have to be filled as older executives and managers retire.
Employers that want to harness the managerial skills of newcomers should think about building on-the-job management training, suggested Laroche. To play it safe, an employer can start slow and test out an immigrant manager’s supervisory skills by assigning a minimum of subordinates at the beginning.
At SpeakWell, a Toronto-based language and communication training company, director Jayne Edmonds said training for immigrant managers should incorporate leadership training with training in communications as well as English-as-a-second-language. Newcomers, even those who have a good grasp of English, may not be confident in their use of nuanced communication techniques that lend them authority and credibility, she said.
At StaffLink Solutions, president Tim Collins recommends that companies use mentoring programs to develop immigrant staff. Collins, who hired Fazili as a part-time accountant and has since made him director of finance, sees Fazili as a mutual mentor.
“I’ve learned a lot from him and he has learned a lot from me. The real life experiences that a lot of these people have can make a company much, much more successful, but making companies aware of this is a challenge,” said Collins.
Employers have to get rid of the mindset that management meetings would go smoother if everybody around the table is the same. Diversity in the workforce allows for diversity in ideas and innovations, said Collins.
“And adaptability is a huge factor. People have more abilities because they have been able to adapt to new cultures. When CEOs stress out about getting the right managers, the thing they have to realize is they have a huge candidate pool that they’re not drawing from.”
