Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Honourable members of the standing committee, my name is Thomas Tam. I'm the CEO of SUCCESS, which is a multicultural organization serving new Canadians in British Columbia. We serve over 180,000 people a year through our offices in greater Vancouver, northern B.C., and three overseas offices in China, Korea, and Taiwan.
Today my focus will be on the foreign credentials recognition process. As an immigrant-serving agency, we have been working with internationally educated skilled workers, or IEPs, since 2001. Of course, we have a lot of partners. We partner with employers, sector councils, regulatory bodies, and government departments. Details of our involvement and services are attached for your reference.
Today I will focus on our recommendations to overcome the systematic challenges faced by internationally trained professionals. They face four major challenges, but recently we identified an additional fifth one.
The first four challenges are lack of Canadian work experience, lack of Canadian cultural exposure, lack of language proficiency, and lack of a Canadian network. The recent fifth challenge we have identified is the financial barriers. I think in the previous session, there was also some discussion on the financial barriers facing foreign-trained professionals.
In terms of recommendations, we recommend a six-point strategy. There are six areas that we would like the committee, as well as the federal government, to consider. We suggest a specialized foreign credential recognition case management service. At this time, most new immigrants can only get employment services at a provincial level in a very piecemeal manner. It's short term and when the funding contract is finished, there's no continuity of service for the internationally educated professionals. As you know, the whole process is very lengthy, costly, and sometimes insulting, so a lot of immigrants end up just getting survival-type jobs. They may not be able to afford the long battle without a very supportive case management system.
Second, we recommend a new and separate language and communication proficiency to replace cultural competency training. Language and workplace culture are always very big hurdles for foreign-trained professionals entering the different professions. This is what we call a soft skill. We have a lot of experience working with sector councils and employers, and this proved to be a very effective way to speed up the whole foreign credentials recognition process.
Third, we recommend an effective bridging mechanism between the internationally educated professionals and the regulatory bodies. This bridging program would be different from what we just discussed; it's not a technical bridging program. We find that many internationally trained professionals group together, but they don't have very good communication with the regulatory bodies. We tried a couple of projects. One was working with foreign-trained nurses in B.C., in partnership with the nurses' union of the province, to develop some support groups among the nurses. Then the nurses grouped together to support each other, and we also organized activities between the support groups, the nurses' union, and some regulatory bodies. People can sustain the struggle with the support of their peers on the same journey toward the foreign credentials recognition process. We would like to see more support for these support groups so that they can sustain the whole journey.
Fourth, we recommend extensive work placement services for IEPs. I think Joan also mentioned that. Mentoring and placement opportunities are very important. In B.C. we've been working closely with both the local organizations as well as some sector councils. We work with ICTC, the Information Communication and Technology Council, to run some pilot projects in Vancouver to help to recruit foreign-trained professionals to get into some placement and mentoring services.
The fifth one is the service support to employers. In the last ten years we never overlooked the importance of employers accepting and understanding the challenges and the benefits of hiring foreign-trained professionals. So the support to employers is very important. We have a website providing the tools for the HR departments of the business owners in terms of hiring and retaining immigrant workers. We also provide training for employers in understanding the challenges of internationally trained professionals.
Finally, we would like this document to support regionalization initiatives. What I mean here is to connect the immigrants to areas of more opportunities, especially in some smaller communities that are industry-based, like our project now at Fort St. John, which is the oil- and gas-based small town in northern B.C. We need more resources and support to encourage internationally trained professionals to go there and to help resolve the skill and labour shortage over there. We've been working very well with the community, with the energy companies, and also with people in Vancouver encouraging immigrants to relocate to the smaller communities.
Honourable members of the standing committee, I respectfully submit my report for your deliberation.
Thank you.