It’s a classic conundrum: You can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without getting a job.
There’s a twist for newcomers to Canada: hundreds of thousands of immigrants who come to this country each year are already highly skilled and experienced, but those qualifications are often overlooked if they weren’t attained here.
This “immigrant bias” compelled a group of immigrant women to design a solution. Companies are paying attention because their success serves as an example for employers from every industry and field.
Here’s how the disruption began…
It started as a volunteer assignment introduced by their mentor Juliette Smith, Manager of the Women IT Teleworkers (WITT) program at the Ottawa Chinese Community Service Centre (OCCSC). The assignment was to create a Co-Parenting App called “KIDS FIRST”.
KIDS FIRST is a web application built on the foundation of assisting separated or divorced parents to coordinate child custody schedules by providing a fair co-parenting platform, as well as, mitigating peaceful communication between parents.
Smith notes that despite not having prior Canadian work experience, the women are still ‘Subject Matter Experts’. She sums up the strategy by saying, “Here, we deal with an amazing pool of talented women in Tech on an everyday basis. We design personalized pathways for each one of them in their field of expertise and help them overcome the challenges and issues they face while job hunting despite being internationally trained. The women bring in a tremendous amount of passion and experience that the tech sector needs.”
Smith confides, “However, it was a game-changer when a consulting company offered a paid contract to the mentees.” The company was Valencia Risk, and in 2022, they had given the WITT mentees a complex task: to develop a web application that provides its users a dashboard with an overview of their cybersecurity risk landscape.
Project Manager Victoria Gadis Torp breaks it down: “10 immigrant women from various backgrounds came together. There were full stack developers, back-end and front-end focused developers, UX/UI designers, data scientists, and quality engineers, all working together to develop this Dashboard App. The project members were divided into two main groups: a UX/UI Design Team that created the visual designs and dictated the user-friendliness of the web application, and a Developer Team that did the coding, bringing the app to life.”
How it played out…
One of Valencia Risk’s clients had a problem; they had no idea of how to measure and manage cybersecurity risks and had a need for a simple visual tool usable by non-cyber experts. In fact, Valencia had seen this same problem with many of their clients. “For years, we have been rigorously simplifying complex security solutions for mid-market environments. Now, we learned that we needed to tell the story of cybersecurity risks to clients” says Aron Feuer, the CEO of Valencia Risk. “We found nothing in the market that was appropriate. All made by engineers for geeks, or too complicated. We needed a hero to help us find new solutions that embraced the low-code, no-code, cloud. Enter WITT and the brilliant guidance of Roe and Victoria to create our solution,” he adds.
Torp affirms that such opportunities act as a ‘foot in the door’ for immigrant job seekers. Being a newcomer herself, she had been hired as a Cybersecurity Risk Analyst at Valencia Risk months earlier as a result of a previous WITT project like this one. Lili Mirba, Tina Carvalho, and Simin Asadzadeh, team members in the project, share their similar experiences.
Lili Mirba, a trained system administrator who moved over to the field of UX/UI, and a WITT mentee, adds more. “Some of us had previously volunteered and designed a web application for another client. A paid opportunity inspires me to work with added responsibilities. I could showcase my creativity and forward-thinking abilities and design solutions with a client’s future needs in mind. At the same time, I continued learning about the Canadian workplace, ethics, culture, and people.”
Lili headed the UX and UI design team and aspires to be an AR-VR designer. “The team worked remotely from all parts of Canada, so it made us technically sound. And not being able to physically meet the team polished our communication and collaboration skills, which is crucial when working remotely. It gave us the confidence essential to face the market challenges,” tells Lili. Thanks to the experience she acquired during the project, she secured a Senior Manager UX Designer role at RBC.
Tina Carvalho contributed as a front-end web developer. “My role included writing the frontend code, verifying it with the backend developers, and validating with the UX/UI design team that the code did what they wanted it to do. I worked with the other developers to make sure the code worked with all the code changes and merges made. We had weekly meetings with all project members to discuss issues. Sometimes there would be mistakes or incompatibilities somewhere in the code that we had to sniff out and come up with resolutions for. It enhanced my problem-solving abilities.” Tina recently secured her first job and gives her thanks to WITT and Valencia Risk for letting her play a significant role in the project.
Simin Asadzadeh, one of the designers, is one of many examples of newcomers who are open to new challenges while being flexible with their career paths. Asadzadeh is a trained civil engineer with five years of experience in the field of disaster management and research. “Although I have work experience from abroad, I faced some challenges with the Canadian job market when I arrived. Then I learned about UX-UI design through a few boot camps and got myself certified. After I was introduced to WITT, there was no looking back,” Simin explains.
“Today I am more tech-savvy and feel seasoned in my area of interest. Moreover, I feel confident having created the Canadian work experience that employers seek.” She stresses that more companies should trust newcomers and their transferrable abilities harvested from abroad.
The Women IT Teleworkers (WITT) program was first established under the Ottawa Chinese Community Service Centre (OCCSC), a non-profit organization that strives to close the gaps between Immigrants and Canadian employers.
WITT meets with hundreds of women like Torp, Mirba, and Asadzadeh regularly, and the goal is to connect them with Canadian companies. The web application project proved to be a huge success. 9 of 10 women who worked on this paid contract found full-time employment, all thanks to WITT for creating a space for these women to showcase their skills and abilities through various initiatives. To its credit, Valencia Risk could see past the ‘immigrant bias’ and allowed the women to shine.
The beauty of the solution rests in the triple win. The women excel and can support their families. The company gets a better product which leads to more revenue. And Canada gains newcomers who feel welcome and in turn, gives credence to the identity of being a land that embraces multiculturalism and diversity. The question is, are there more companies who dare to hire Subject Matter Expert newcomers? If you are one of them, then know that WITT and its members are ready for a new challenge!
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Written by: Janhhavi Savaikar