Mentoring facilitates a connection between a skilled immigrant and an established Canadian professional in the same or related occupation.

Why mentoring?

Mentoring is a way to overcome some of the barriers skilled immigrants encounter when trying to find employment in their area of expertise. The three biggest barriers are:

• Lack of an effective professional network: newcomers don’t have access to the hidden job market, including job openings that are not advertised;
• Lack of understanding of the Canadian workplace culture and employer expectations; and
• Lack of recognition of international qualifications and experience, which makes it difficult for skilled immigrants to talk about their transferable skills.

Mentoring is more than just matchmaking. Mentoring is a deliberate and sustained strategy to create and facilitate new networks for recent skilled immigrants in their fields of expertise. It is a process that starts with the right occupation-specific match, builds a relationship over time, and leads to gainful employment.

Mentoring is also a two-way street. It’s not just the newcomer who benefits. At the core of successful mentoring programs is a weave of mutually beneficial relationships – between the mentor and the mentee, between employers and their employees and between frontline organizations and their clients. Mentoring fuels these relationships and produces results from end to end.

For more information, read the National Mentoring Initiative backgrounder (pdf).

2011 National Mentoring Initiative Overview

Read Peter Paul’s commentary on the importance of mentoring in helping skilled immigrants find employment.

How we can help

Mentoring programs are currently active in the following cities: Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston, Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.  The ALLIES National Mentoring Initiative aims to promote mentoring from coast to coast as a proven strategy for skilled immigrants to integrate into the labour market.

We do this in three ways:

1. By capturing and sharing insights through our online mentoring toolkit and providing accompanying resource documents.
2. By providing you with expert coaches willing to share their knowledge with you.
3. By leveraging corporate relationships with national employers.

Funding for the National Mentoring Initiative is provided by TD Bank Group.