Internships: Getting a Foot in the Door

by Ellen Roseman (eroseman@thestar.ca)

Jaime Hurlbut has a bachelor of arts degree in communications from the University of Ottawa. She wanted to work in event planning and media, but struggled to find a job. "Once I graduated, I quickly realized that most jobs in my field required two to three years of experience. How was I to get this experience?" After doing research on the Internet, she found Career Edge. It's a not-for-profit organization that offers one-year internships for recent graduates hoping to launch careers in their chosen field. Hurlbut got a chance to do the work she dreamed of as an intern with the Canadian Youth Business Foundation. She was hired full-time later and spent three-and-a-half years there. Today, she's the events and communications director at another non-profit group, ACE Canada (Advancing Canadian Entrepreneurship). "The internship opened huge doors for me," says Hurlbut, 29. "I can't thank Career Edge enough. Of the people I keep in contact with, I'm one of three actually working in our field." Started by a group of Toronto business leaders, the Career Edge Organization has placed more than 7,000 interns in its 10 years of existence. It currently has 26 active postings for interns, with 98 in the process of being filled. "The advantages for job seekers are enormous," says Kimberley Wakefield, director of marketing and communications. "You get practical, career-related work experience. You get to apply the knowledge you learn in school to the work world.

"All our host organizations provide coaching and support, so you learn what behaviour is expected and how to work with people of all different ages, experience and background." Career Edge interns are paid $20,000 a year. The stipend goes up to $22,000 starting April 1, 2007. Can you live and work in high-cost Toronto for $1,667 a month before tax? What if you have student debts to repay? "It was very difficult living on that salary," says Hurlbut. "I rented a room in Ajax, outside Toronto, and my employer paid for a GO train pass. My parents also helped out." With $37,000 outstanding in student loans, she applied for interest relief for the first two years. Only now — six years after graduation — is she making her last payments to the Ontario Student Assistance Program. Internships are a way to break into more creative fields such as media, advertising, publishing or the arts. You can also accept short-term contracts or project work. But you may have to live on starvation wages while you get your foot in the door. "You hear science and commerce students talking about the salaries they're making and you're not earning anywhere near that amount," says Anne Markey, executive director of the Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers. "Don't get caught up in the salary. You need some experience. Even if you're with a company for one or two months, you can make a big contribution and gain a huge edge. "Consider getting into the field you want, but not the job you want, by working in data entry or reception. You can get a sense of the work environment, the culture, even the language. "Don't undersell yourself, but don't have too closed a mind. Take any option that will get you where you want to go."

With internships, the salary may be low — but so is the commitment. "Look at an internship as a further investment in your education, a way for you to test out the career you may be interested in," says Wakefield. "It's a giant leg up." More than 50 per cent of Career Edge interns are hired after they finish. They get a job with the same employer or another company in their field. About half the postings are business-related — human resources, accounting, finance, marketing, sales and communications. Another 30 per cent are in information technology and the rest are in fields such as health sciences and engineering. Career Edge has spun off two related organizations: Career Bridge for foreign-trained professionals and Ability Edge for graduates with disabilities. "We've worked with over 1,000 organizations in our 10-year history," Wakefield says. Both the Ontario government and the city of Toronto are host employers. What are the advantages for employers? Low costs are an attraction, for sure. A 12-month internship costs an employer about $25,000. This includes the intern's stipend plus payroll taxes, worker's compensation and a small program delivery fee to Career Edge. "Employers can choose to top up an intern's salary or give bonuses. We don't take any percentage of that," says Wakefield. "We do all the recruiting and we have people on staff going to career fairs and networking. We also facilitate and manage the payroll here." The lack of commitment means lower risk. Employers can try young people out before hiring them full-time and see whether they fit into the corporate culture. It's like an extended job interview. Other benefits for employers: Expanding the pool of entry-level talent; meeting diversity targets; covering short-term needs and maternity leaves; and extending the hiring budget. Interns are Career Edge employees while working at their host organizations. They don't affect the host's head count. Meanwhile, employers don't pay any extra fees if they hire someone at the end of the internship. That would defeat the purpose of the program, Wakefield says. The internship program is open to recent graduates who want to build up their resumés and get their careers launched. They can use it once only. (You can find more information at http://www.CareerEdge.ca or by calling 416-977-3343.) Recent graduates can also check out the Ontario government's two-year internship program. It pays salaries ranging from $39,700 to $54,500 a year for entry-level work in seven fields — business and financial planning, communication, human resources, information technology, labour relations, policy development and project management. Candidates must have graduated from a recognized college or university within the past two years (May 2005 to August 2007). They submit an application online from Jan. 2 to Jan. 29, 2007, with the internship to begin on June 11. For more information, go to http://www.internship.gov.on.ca

A Toronto Experience

by Rudyard Griffiths (rudyard@dominion. ca) is the director of the Dominion Institute

It is the quintessential Toronto experience. You get into a taxi and in the space of a few minutes your conversation with the driver goes from talking about the weather to sharing your life stories. One cabbie I recently met immigrated to Canada a decade ago. He took up taxi driving because his engineering degree was not recognized by Canadian employers. He and his wife had three children in Canada, but she decided to return to India to live with their extended family. With a bullish real estate market and good job prospects in Mumbai, his home country of India was starting to look more like the land of opportunity and Canada a dead-end. My cab ride hit home for me the scale of the challenge we face in terms of attracting and retaining immigrants in a fast-changing global economy. Let's face it, Canadians have a mile-wide blind spot when it comes to how we think potential and new immigrants perceive our country. We assume the world is clamouring to come to Canada. Longer-settled Canadians are also quick to believe that our "First World" status gives us the pick of skilled foreign workers. We know there are problems with the accreditation of skills learned and practised in other countries, but we think that our much vaunted health-care system and multiculturalism make Canada an irresistibly attractive place to settle and raise a family.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. Canada is the second choice for the majority of new immigrants. Of the 250,000 people who acquired Canadian citizenship last year, only a quarter were skilled or professional workers. Yes, everyone appreciates our health-care system and the diversity of our big cities; yet fully one in three immigrants eventually leaves. It's hardly surprising that we are doing a lousy job retaining immigrants when you consider that a third of new citizens don't speak French or English, yet only 20 per cent of federal spending on immigration goes toward language training. It also doesn't help that, while Ontario receives almost half of all newcomers,the province receives only $1,500 per immigrant versus more than $3,000 in Quebec. Behind these numbers lie the reality that the children of low-income immigrants aren't climbing up the economic ladder and, instead, find themselves stuck in the same dead-end jobs as their parents. Our collective failure to provide new citizens with opportunities to succeed needs to be set against the new global reality. We live in an era typified by cheap global communication and travel. New citizens, compared with previous waves of immigrants, use satellite television, cellphones and charter flights to maintain close, if not seamless, connection with family and friends in their country of origin. With one quarter of all immigrants to Canada hailing from China or India — two booming economies where property values are soaring and middle-class jobs are being created hand over fist — many new Canadians, such as the taxi driver I met, are questioning why they should stay when they can't use their hard-won skills. Why not return home and benefit from a fast-growing economy, extended family networks, and familiar culture and language?

The free flow of information in our globalizing world has also created a two-way conversation. Potential immigrants, especially those with strong technical skills, are learning from contacts in Canada just how dysfunctional our immigration system is and the real hardships they could face here. Considering that in five years all of Canada's net labour force growth will come from immigration, what can we do to improve the system? We have to understand, deep down, that getting our immigration policy right is as important to our country's long-term well-being as addressing global warming, fighting terrorism or sustaining publicly funded health care. To this end, we have to wake up from our narcissistic delusions about what Canada offers newcomers beyond multiculturalism. Immigrants have never had more choice as to where and how they live their lives. If we don't start building a settlement system that really works — the $307 million in new federal funding being a step in the right direction — immigrants will vote with their feet and trigger an exodus that Canada simply can't afford.

Dealing a Robber with your ATM Card

Here is a WONDERFUL tip to escape from a Robber forcing you to use ATM card. If you should ever be forced by a robber to withdraw money from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your Pin # in reverse.

For example, if your PIN number is 1234 then you would put in 4321. The ATM recognizes that your pin number is backwards from the ATM card you placed in the machine. The machine will still give you the money you requested, but unknown to the robber, the machine initiates alarm signal to authority and the police will be immediately dispatched to help you. This information was recently broadcasted on TV and it states that it is seldom used because people don't know it exists!!!

Passport Deadline Nears, Few Americans Prepared

by Dan Schlossberg, ConsumerAffairs.Com

Fewer than two months remain before arriving international passengers at U.S. airports will be required to show passports as the only acceptable proof of citizenship. The rule applies to American citizens too, even though only about one in four has a valid passport. With the holiday shopping season, winter weather, and the $97 fee standing in the way, the betting line on people meeting the deadline is not favorable. Making matters more difficult is that the usual six-week waiting period will coincide with the holiday-card crush for those who prefer to acquire passports by mail. Even arrivals from Canada, Bermuda, and Mexico will be subject to the new regulations. According to Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, strengthening the rules reduces the chances of a terrorist entering the country. "We're always better off when we build higher levels of security," he said. "The ability to misuse travel documents to enter this country opens the door for a terrorist. "None of these steps is foolproof and none of them is perfect. But each of them raises the bar to an attack."

Chertoff said more than 8,000 different state and local agencies issue birth certificates and driver's licenses - the forms of personal ID most prevalent in travel today. Deciphering each one, and determining which ones could be fraudulent, has placed an enormous burden on customs, immigration, and border officials, he said. Land and sea arrivals will be covered by a separate program, Chertoff noted. Starting in January 2008, they will also have to show passports or proposed alternative security identity cards. The new passport rules will not apply to Americans returning from Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, or other territories. But the North American Travel Journalists Association, whose members fly often, recommends that passengers carry them anyway to avoid potential airport problems. Several members of Congress have long urged tougher implementation of rules regarding security documents - a recommendation of the Sept. 11 Commission created in the wake of terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

First Step to Helping Skilled Immigrants

by Ian Urquhart (iurquha@thestar.ca)

Every year about 20,000 foreign-trained professionals immigrate to this province. Back home, they were doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, nurses, teachers, and so on. But, more often than not, here they end up driving cabs or serving fast food — and becoming more bitter by the day. In extreme cases, they kill themselves. Two suicides in the Chinese Canadian community over the past two years have been linked to underemployment. The Liberal government at Queen's Park is taking aim at this problem with Bill 124 — legislation that would create a "fairness commissioner." The commissioner would oversee the 34 regulatory bodies governing the professions in Ontario and make sure their accreditation practices do not discriminate against the foreign-trained. The bill, which is now going through committee, has met with a decidedly mixed reaction. In the immigrant community, the legislation has been welcomed, although some groups have argued that it does not go far enough. Some of the regulatory bodies — notably those for accountants and engineers — have also supported the legislation because they believe their practices would withstand scrutiny by the fairness commissioner. However, other regulatory bodies, mostly those for the health-care professions but also for the teachers, have expressed grave concerns that the legislation would erode their independence and undermine their mandate to protect the public.

The health-care bodies have also suggested the fairness commissioner would be redundant because they are already subject to oversight by the Health Professions Appeal and Review Board. Politically, reaction to the bill has also been divided. The Liberals, of course, are trumpeting it as a vehicle to ensure that foreign-trained professionals get "a fair shot at working in their chosen field here in Ontario." The New Democrats say Bill 124 doesn't go far enough. Specifically, they want an appeals body created for the non-health-care regulatory bodies, as recommended in an advisory report on the issue. But it is the Conservatives whose response to Bill 124 has been most interesting. In second reading debate, while they were careful to say they supported the "intent" of the bill, the Conservatives attacked the proposed fairness commissioner as "a new layer of bureaucracy." They also approvingly quoted from a column in the National Post by George Jonas (ironically, himself an immigrant) deriding the fairness commissioner as a "fairness fairy" whose chief concern will be "political correctness." At committee hearings, when one spokesperson for immigrants testified strongly in support of Bill 124, Frank Klees, the lead Conservative critic on the committee chastised him: "You sound like an apologist for the government."

How does this reaction square with Conservative Leader John Tory, who this week held a press conference to promote his own ideas for helping skilled immigrants? "We have permitted far too many people who we invited to come to Canada to become marginalized, to fall between the cracks," said Tory. "We must not let that become some sort of permanent fact of life because it is not acceptable and it isn't consistent in any way with the pride we take in embracing diversity." Asked at the press conference whether regulatory bodies were part of the problem, Tory agreed that they have "not demonstrated the sense of urgency they should." Asked whether his party will support Bill 124 on third reading, Tory replied: "I expect we probably will," subject to how proposed Conservative amendments are dealt with by the government. We shall see. Back to Bill 124: Will it solve the problem of underemployed immigrants? Probably just on the margins, for the real source of the problem is not foot-dragging by regulatory bodies at this end of the immigration process. Rather, it is at the other end, where immigrants are first screened for entry into Canada. This fact was acknowledged in the Legislature last month by Mike Colle, the minister who introduced Bill 124. He noted that there are some 15,000 foreign-trained engineers coming here every year and competing for jobs with 5,000 engineering graduates from Ontario schools. "There's no connection with the reality of the job market," said Colle. But, of course, screening of immigrants is a federal responsibility. It is the subject of discussions between the two levels of government, but it will take time to fix. Meanwhile, Bill 124 may be the best the province has to offer foreign-trained professionals. It is not enough, of course, but it is an important first step.