Starting over in a new place is never easy - especially if you're one of the tens of thousands of people who come to Canada each year facing the challenges of rebuilding their careers along with their lives.

The dreams of a promising future that lure new Canadians to this country can be stymied by the barriers to employment faced by those entering the workforce with little or no Canadian job experience.

With the hope of smoothing these transitions for new Canadians, the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) launched the Mentoring Partnership in November.

The program, which pairs carefully screened immigrant job-searchers with mentors in industry and the public sector, aims to help new Canadians get a foot in the door by giving them some of the cultural experience they need within their career fields, as well as personalized guidance on their job searches.

Liz Clayton, Business Edge
Toronto Regional Conservation Authority mentor Chris Benjamin and Maria-Luisa Elias.

The program is currently managing 200 pairs of mentor-mentee relationships in companies from the business sector - Deloitte was an early partner in the program - to public institutions such as the City of Toronto. The program's goal is to have 1,000 such partnerships set up across the Greater Toronto Area by the end of its first year.

TRIEC is a volunteer-driven organization drawing from the corporate, educational, community and government spheres. It has created numerous programs such as Career Bridge, Occupation and Licensing Bridge.

Mentors in the program span varying levels of seniority in their organizations.

Rick Ducharme, chief general manager of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), has been mentoring Ikramuddeen Abdul Gaffar, a civil engineer newly arrived from India, for the last few months.

For Ducharme, the program is as much about paying back a debt to society as it is about improving opportunities for immigrants.

"I was fortunate in my career, because I've been fairly successful, my mentors were my bosses and friends in the industry," Ducharme said. "So, I thought with my background and exposure, if I can do that with someone else's career, why not?

"We've got to break this barrier that's set up there," Ducharme said of the challenges faced by newly landed job-seekers, many of whom find their skills languishing in jobs outside their field for lack of Canadian experience.

Ducharme and Gaffar meet monthly and discuss ways for Gaffar to break into the engineering field in Canada. Ducharme has already arranged onsite visits for Gaffar at several TTC construction projects, which Gaffar has found instructive.

"When I landed here I was confused, because I didn't know which position I was eligible for," Gaffar said. He added that in India civil engineers are responsible for a much broader scope of duties than they are in Canada.

"In India, I had to do all the jobs, from estimation to the dirty work to building construction. Here it is a little bit different. Estimators are doing estimate work and civil engineering differently. Here, they have construction managers, (there) they have construction engineers," said Gaffar.

Although Gaffar is qualified to work at a position higher than entry level based on his job experience in India, he is seeking an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a Canadian company to gain Canadian experience, as well as to acclimatize.

"There is a different work culture here, so I must get accustomed to this," Gaffar said. He added that an entry-level position also would allow him to learn about some of the different factors involved in construction in Canada's cold climate versus that of his native India.

Gaffar said the program provides a definite advantage in finding the right career in his new country. "It's a fantastic program. I've got a very good mentor, he's a great person, he's very easily accessible. That's very important to me. I am lucky."

Another of the dozens of organizations involved with the Mentoring Partnership is the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA).

The agency, which is dedicated to conservation, preservation and the environment, is hosting 12 mentees.

Chris Benjamin, TRCA's volunteerism and diversity co-ordinator, believes that the pool of immigrant job-seekers is an underutilized resource for most organizations.

"New Canadians are a major source of labour that hasn't been tapped into and, for our organization, it's a chance to expose our staff directly to the talent that's in this group. And hopefully it's a chance to create a new source of staff in the future," said Benjamin, who has been working with Maria-Luisa Elias as a result of the program.

Mentees working with staff at TRCA are, like Gaffar, learning valuable job-search skills, networking and getting used to the Canadian vernacular for their area of work.

"Although their English is strong, they may not know the jargon in their field yet," Benjamin said, because many of the program participants speak English as a second language.

Through job shadowing, allowing mentees to sit in on meetings and connecting them with a network of colleagues, TRCA has already helped one of its new Canadians, a geographic information specialist, find full-time employment in his field.

The blossoming mentorship program launched in the Region of Peel on Feb. 28 and plans to launch in York Region in April. The partnership is delivered through local job-service providers in each area, such as Jobstart in Toronto, Dixie Bloor Neighbourhood Services in Peel and COSTI in York.

Plans to expand the program into the Halton and Durham regions are in the works, said Sangeeta Subramanian, project manager for the Mentoring Partnership.

While the program is clearly of benefit to new Canadians looking for work, the value for employers is proving to be tremendous as well.

The mentor-mentee relationship allows employers "to experience this in a safe way so that some of the perceptions of risk that are associated with hiring internationally trained professionals are taken away," Subramanian said.

Allowing employers to witness firsthand the benefits and potential of newly arrived Canadians opens up a world of opportunities - and understanding - for the companies, as well.

"I think the more you work with diverse cultures, the more you realize the definition of 'normal' expands," Benjamin said. "Every different culture has different values, ways of communicating, ways of being, but if you open your mind to the culture where you're coming from it really broadens your horizons.

"The biggest thing I've learned from it is that what we consider normal really expands."

(Liz Clayton can be reached at clayton@businessedge.ca)