Abstract
This article examines issues of foreign credential recognition from the standpoint of immigrant women with post-secondary degrees and employment backgrounds in non-regulated managerial and business professional occupations. Drawing on interviews with recent immigrant women and service providers in Calgary, Alberta, the article describes the women’s experience of looking for work, locating it in the context of the wider organization of settlement services and the labour market. The discussion focuses on the women’s participation in bridging programs designed to connect skilled immigrants with mainstream employers and help them obtain “entry-level” jobs in their fields.
Résumé
Cet article examine la question de la reconnaissance des acquis et des compétences du point de vue des femmes immigrantes qui possèdent un diplôme universitaire et une expérience professionelle dans des emplois administratifs et managériaux non régulés. S’appuyant sur des entretiens effectués à Calgary auprès d’immigrantes récentes et de pourvoyeurs de services, l’article décrit l’expérience de ces femmes en matière de recherche d’emploi en la replaçant dans le contexte plus large de l’organisation des services d’éstablissement et du marché du travail. La discussion met l’accent sur la participation de ces femmes dans les programmes de transition conçus pour mettre en contact les immigrants qualifiés avec des employeurs potentiels et pour les aider à trouver un emploi de débutante dans leur domaine.
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Notes
For example, the Ministry of Human Resources and Employment has recently been renamed the Ministry of Employment, Immigration and Industry.
The organization and availability of federally funded ESL courses, especially with respect to courses at advanced levels, is a crucial piece in the institutional field of settlement services. For reasons of space, however, we do not focus on it here except to note that in the past year a number of “business English” courses have been funded by the Province of Alberta, which were not available to the women in 2004. Here is one example of the continual evolution in the institutional field of settlement and integration.
This description applies to the centre’s mandate at the time the women in the panel were looking for work. Contracts and mandates for these services are periodically renewed and terms of service change.
A common pattern is for immigrant women to delay their own career efforts, taking survival jobs to support the family while the husband concentrates on obtaining professional employment. However, some dual-career immigrant couples make other choices based on practical logic rather than traditional gender roles; for example, they may take into consideration how well each partner speaks English and which partner’s occupation seems to offer the most favourable employment possibilities.
Some business professional occupations such as human resources have formed professional associations and developed examination-based credentials. To the extent that employers know about these credentials and respect the credentialling process, job applicants – immigrant or native-born – who have obtained the qualification may be preferred over those who have not. But these optional credentialling processes may take as long as those in the regulated professions, and therefore cannot help immigrants in their early job searches.
Assessments of the skills used in various jobs are far from objective. Systems for assigning objective values to job skills run into the problem that perceptions of skill are always located in historical relations of class and gender. Skills associated with women’s jobs are typically assigned less value than skills associated with men’s jobs, and the skills used in low-prestige work are underestimated in comparison with the skills attributed to more prestigious work (Gaskell 1991). This said, we can still acknowledge that the women feel that the work they are doing uses much less of their knowledge and abilities than the work they did before immigrating.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Standard Research Grant. The helpful suggestions of Gillian Ranson, Peter Grant, and two anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged, as is Daniel Béland’s French translation of the abstract.
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McCoy, L., Masuch, C. Beyond “Entry-level” Jobs: Immigrant Women and Non-regulated Professional Occupations. Int. Migration & Integration 8, 185–206 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-007-0013-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-007-0013-0