Canada invests in employment services for newcomers

Chiari: Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Ligia Chiari and I am a manager with JVS Toronto’s pre arrival programs. Today we are here to talk about Canada Infonet and mentoring newcomers to Canada. Canada Infonet is a free eight week employment acceleration and mentorship program designed for professionals, approved to immigrate to Canada and to talk about mostly the mentorship aspect of it.

We have one of our mentors here. I’m happy to welcome Hugo O’Doherty, who has been a mentor with us for about a year and is here to share some of his experiences. Thank you, Hugo, for taking this, accepting our invitation to be interviewed.

O’Doherty: No problem, Ligia. Happy to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.

Chiari: Thank you. So we’ll start, if you can share a little bit about your history and why did you choose to become a mentor for immigrants?

O’Doherty: Yeah, I’m originally from Ireland, so I’ve been in Canada for eleven or twelve years. And over the course of that time, I like to think I’ve picked up one or two little tricks, both in my own experience, but also in the experience of the community that we serve at my employer, which is Moving2Canada.com, which some viewers might be familiar with, that’s Moving2Canada.com.

So helping newcomers, empowering them to be successful in Canada has been something that we’ve been doing, anyway for years, but sort of at scale through information. And Canada Infonet then offered me an opportunity to do that more on a one-on-one or small group basis, which seems exciting and a nice sort of change of routine for me.

So through my work with Moving2Canada, I’ve been able to sort of gather some insights and sort of trends that hopefully I’m able to help people get a bit of a springboard into their new life in Canada.

And as well, I learned things from them. I’m learning about what it’s like to move here in 2023 versus 2011. The world’s moved on quite a lot in that time, so always picking up new insights, trends, and information from people.

Chiari: Thank you for sharing. It’s nice that you mentioned that you are an immigrant yourself, but you’re also still learning from the immigrants that you now mentor, right? I think a lot of people may not understand how you can benefit from being a mentor.

So can you tell a little bit more about that in this about year that you have been mentoring with us or any other mentoring experiences? How do you benefit from being a mentor?

O’Doherty: Yeah, good question. I mean, I’m learning every hour, every day from this opportunity.

Assuming there’s some people out there who are watching, who might themselves be hiring managers or employers in Canada. It’s great to be able to learn from newcomers because these newcomers are basically providing the labor that will bolster the entire economy and ultimately help to pay for the social programs that we’ll all enjoy when we’re old and gray.

So these are the people that are providing the necessary firepower to move the Canadian economy forward. And in the process of mentoring them, it actually helps, I think, employers or hiring managers learn and solve HR problems that they might experience in their own organizations.

I know that that’s been the case for me and for the organization that I work for. But I don’t think it’s necessary to be in the newcomer space to learn from newcomers and be able to leverage that into your day-to-day work.

So that’s one benefit that people could have from mentoring. But that seems a bit transactional, and maybe there’s just something richer behind that, which is helping people, empowering them to succeed helps you feel good.

It puts a pep in your step. It’s a nice break in your week to help someone for 20 or 30 minutes or maybe even up to an hour every week. It just really kind of recharges your batteries and makes you feel good about yourself.

And everyone’s a winner in that case.

Chiari: Yes, and that’s what matters, right? It’s good that you can feel good about helping them. So it’s a win win situation. Everybody wins. So we talked about the benefits for a mentor.

From your experience as an immigrant, did you have any mentors or how was your experience with that?

O’Doherty: Yeah, good question. I think a lot of people can point to mentors in their lives that are more informal, so someone who might just be in a more senior position in an organization or an industry or a certain city that they can lean on for advice or information.

The beauty of the Canada Infonet program is that they sort of formalize that process and hold both the mentor and the mentee accountable to that process. So great people like you and your colleagues sort of turn up, and they’re the glue that makes it all kind of work.

And did I have any mentors? Yeah. I mean, I did, but they weren’t what I would call informal sense a mentor. They were more just people who I learned from. And I suppose it comes down to your definition of mentorship at that point, so both yes and no.

But let’s say, yes, I had some mentors, but. Nothing through a formal process like this. And if I was eligible for or aware of a program like this when I moved, I definitely would have leaned on it at that time.

Chiari: Yeah. So you’d say you would recommend to a new immigrant to have a mentor, a formal mentor.

O’Doherty: If you think of, like, risk reward, there’s, like, very little risk if the worst that could happen is you just don’t jive with the person, but you know that’s, you know, you’ve only sunk, you know, a little bit of time and attention into it.

And the potential upside is you could learn so much from this person. They could give you a springboard towards an amazing job opportunity in Canada, or just fine tune how to present yourself to potential employers and colleagues, et cetera.

And yet the rewards could be incredible.

Chiari: Yeah, I agree with you. I used to be a coach as well, so, like, a mentoring coach. So that third person in our program that monitors and mediates that relationship, and I used to tell my mentees when they were not sure, oh, I’m not sure if this mentor is right for me, or it’s not exactly what I was looking for.

Any mentor will be better than no mentor, right? So it’s one more connection. It’s one more person for you to learn from. And like you said, the risk is basically zero, because the risk is that you spend maybe a couple of hours over a couple of weeks and be like, yeah, maybe I didn’t gain so much.

But you always do. You always gain something, right?

O’Doherty: Yeah. And even then, you might not even realize that what you learned until months later. You might hear something that you dismiss at the time, and then months later, it actually just becomes more applied and less abstract, and you can be like, oh, I actually did learn from that person.

Chiari: That is so important, actually, because. I’m an immigrant myself as well, and a lot of the things that I was learning in the beginning when I arrived in the country and attending workshops and services like the ones that we offer at JVS, it’s so much information that you may not realize, and then a year down the road, you’re like, oh, yeah, I learned that from that person.

So, a little bit more about the program per se. At Canada InfoNet, we offer one on one mentorship, and we have been offering that for many years, but we now also offer group mentoring, which is something that JVS Toronto already has an expertise.

We were doing in person group mentoring before, but now we also have the online group mentoring, which we had the pleasure to have you as one of the mentors in these group sessions. So can you share a little bit about how different is it from the one on one mentoring?

I know there’s benefits to both, but just if you can tell us your experience.

O’Doherty: Yeah, I’ve done both. The one on one and the group formats, they’re quite different. In the Canada Infonet program, the one on one format, at least at the time I did it, which is sort of 2021, 2022.

I continue to do it in the future, but those are my reference points in the past, it was through the platform itself, so it was more text based, and it was asynchronous. The mentee would send an email and I would reply the next day.

There might be a time zone of ten or 12 hours because they’re moving. I can think of one person who has moved from Hong Kong. So we were never sort of online at the same time. And then the group format was sessions like the one you and I are on right now.

Four or five people coming together, sharing knowledge, sharing experience. Um. I preferred the group format. It was a bit more workshoppy. I preferred to be talking to someone in real time rather than writing emails.

And they were quite different. But I know that the different formats provide different types of value to different types of people. And as a mentor, I’m happy to do either format. But given the choice, I definitely preferred to do the group format.

And it also is more scalable. You’re imparting information to three, four or five people at a time, and who knows how that trickles down? Maybe to their spouse or to another person moving to Canada. Whereas when you’re talking one-on-one to someone, it’s more of a one-on-one relationship and it’s less scalable.

Chiari: So I think they were quite different and the group format definitely worked better for me. Is there anything specifically from this last group that you remember that you would like to highlight?

O’Doherty: Yeah, if not all of them.

I’m just trying to remember, we’re from India. There was one person moving to Saskatchewan and we had a bit of a sort of a conversation about how different that might be from where he was moving from.

And then another thing I learned a lot actually, from people. There was one mentee who was doing a one-way interview with a large restaurant chain, international restaurant chain. So it was basically an interview, but it was automated.

Now, I’ve never mentored someone on how to prepare for that format. I was trying to help them prepare, but I was then asking them questions about exactly how it works. And it was kind of mad for me to learn about.

I hesitate to say new technologies. Someone will correct me and say that this type of technology has been there for forever or something. But it’s definitely new to me for someone to be interviewed not by a human, but to actually have to turn up at a certain time and press a button and deliver their interview verbally and on camera, but not to a human.

So there was all these sorts of things that I was learning as well, which were fascinating from this Mentee group. That’s just one example. I could give you ten more, but before we join at the time.

Chiari: Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for sharing. And that’s interesting. It’s another thing to another learning, I guess you get from mentoring is that you stay in touch with hiring practices which are changing all the time, but I would say in the past two and a half years, they have changed even more.

Right. With everything. Yeah. That’s interesting. You’re in touch with interview processes and what’s new? Maybe you haven’t been job searching for a while.

O’Doherty: Yeah, that’s exactly it. I’ve been sort of working in the same organization or at least the same industry in the same city for most of the last ten years without really I’ve changed roles, but I haven’t necessarily changed my city or my industry.

And for a long time now, the company I work with and to learn how things have changed even in the last couple of years definitely provides gives me food for thought as we go out and hire other people for our company as we grow.

So as a mentor, I’m able to bubble that up to my colleagues in my organization and share that information and get everyone sort of of thinking about how things are done around the world in different ways today versus a decade ago.

Chiari: That too. Definitely. Thank you. We’re heading to our last question. We want to not make this too long and take too much of your time, but I heard from. Like someone who shared about your group session.

One of the things that you talked about was the importance of building a local network in Canada. And this was something that was highlighted as good advice that you shared or conversation you had. Would you like to share that with a broader audience and maybe say, what advice would you have for newcomers to build their local network in Canada?

O’Doherty: Yeah, I suppose the advice I wanted to give is only really applicable post arrival. So I would say, look, technology is amazing and has made the networking game so different to when you and I were children and our parents and older siblings were trying to look for work.

Today, it’s so different. Technology is just in a different place, and it’ll only continue to change over the coming years. But one thing I would say is get offline too. And one thing I told one mentee was he was just arriving in Toronto from India.

And I said, when you’re walking down the street, getting the bus, going to the supermarket, don’t just put in your headphones and listen to a podcast or music. Actually just listen to the city around you.

Try and get a sense of the conversations people are having. I know it sounds a bit weird, but really get that multi sensory experience of your new home. And don’t just rely on LinkedIn and Indeed, to do all the heavy lifting for you.

When you’re out and about try and absorb in real time as much as about your new home as possible. Not just for your work, but also for your personal life, your social life. And you never know where in an opportunity might come up just from that.

You might just overhear someone who’s from your home city and you strike up a conversation. This is where it starts. These are the little embers that can light a fire. And that’d be one piece of advice. That’s one piece of many that I could share.

But if in a nutshell, get offline as well. Don’t rely 100% on the technological tools available to us, of course. Leverage them, lean into them, learn about them, but don’t rely on them exclusively would be my advice.

Chiari: That is great advice. I’m going to try to follow it as well because it’s so easy for us to get in our heads and in our phones and not really interact. Right. So, yeah, that’s awesome advice. Thank you for sharing.

Anything else? Any last messages you would like to leave today for maybe someone who’s thinking about mentoring and is not sure? Or anything you’d like to share before we close?

O’Doherty: Yeah, I mean, if you’re thinking about it, I would say just go for it.

You can always just sort of take on a smaller mandate, so maybe just one person at a time or just 30 minutes a week or whatever. Canada Infonet is one way you can mentor. It’s not the only way. I’m sure there’s other ways at a local level, but it’s one way that I recommend if learning about the newcomer experience is something that you’re interested in.

Look, Canada is going to be relying increasingly on newcomers, on immigrants, not just over the coming years, but for sort of the indefinite future throughout the rest of the century. And it’ll serve anyone well to learn more about why these people are moving to this great country, what they want to achieve, and who knows how it might benefit you on personal or professional level.

But if you’re interested in doing it, the rewards are incredible and I highly recommend it.

Chiari: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for the interview. It was a pleasure to have you here. And it’s a pleasure to have you as a mentor in the program.