Evidence of meeting #34 for Status of Women in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was program.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
Would developing mentorship programs be more beneficial than providing financial aid, and if so, why? How would that be more beneficial?
Academic Director, Lecturer, Business Edge, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, As an Individual
I don't think I quite heard all of your question. Was the question whether mentorship would be more valuable than financial aid?
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
So often we feel that we just have to throw money at them to fix them up, but quite often, wouldn't a mentorship program be more beneficial than financial aid? Can you explain how and why it would be more beneficial than financial aid?
Academic Director, Lecturer, Business Edge, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Certainly mentorship programs are not without cost, but assuming we have them, I think mentorship programs are much more useful because they provide opportunities for confidence-building and networking, and they empower our internationally educated professionals to find opportunities far more broadly than simply being the recipients of financial aid would.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
As we know, many arrive already educated, but for those who come here without education, do you feel that education is essential first in order for them to start a business or get involved in economic prosperity?
Academic Director, Lecturer, Business Edge, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, As an Individual
I do not necessarily. One of the things we have observed is that sometimes internationally educated professionals feel they need more education to be successful in Canada. In my view at least, what they need more is the mentorship and the networking, as you've described. Certainly as a professor, I'm not going to knock education, but I think we certainly need to have a combination of education and real-world connection.
In terms of people who arrive without an education, I think education is nice, but sometimes the education might in fact dull their entrepreneurial drive, and I'd be very sorry to see that. I realize we're not all necessarily going to be like the people who drop out of school at 14 and transform the world. I think education has its place, but I certainly don't want to oversell it either.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
I too am a teacher, so I certainly wouldn't be knocking education. I don't want to go in that direction, for sure.
Academic Director, Lecturer, Business Edge, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, As an Individual
I thought it was a bit of a trick question.
November 6th, 2014 / 9:15 a.m.
Conservative
Tilly O'Neill-Gordon Conservative Miramichi, NB
I didn't mean for it to be one.
As well, we see many of the women coming in from other countries, and certainly when we look at other countries we sometimes see programs they provide that are really something Canada should try to implement as well. Can you think of any one country or any one idea in particular that you would like to see us implement?
Academic Director, Lecturer, Business Edge, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, As an Individual
I'm afraid I'm not as familiar with what goes on in other jurisdictions. I know, for example, though, that Denmark does a good deal of both language training and personal development coaching to welcome people into their country. That's one jurisdiction I'm a bit familiar with, but I'm not comfortable extemporizing, beyond the observation I have just made.
NDP
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to Professor Armstrong. I really want to say thank you for your life-changing work. It definitely is life-changing.
I serve one of the most diverse ridings in the country, Etobicoke North, and often the best conversations I have are in taxis, whose drivers may be cardiac surgeons, neurosurgeons, nuclear physicists. I've personally met with more than 100 internationally trained doctors. I want to thank Dr. Sellah for having the courage to speak this morning. As you point out, it's doctors, it's lawyers, it's engineers, it's teachers, and the list goes on.
I'd really like to know how this program works. How many people are trained; how often; for how many hours? What are the issues that are being covered? How do you follow up?
You were talking about a possible recommendation for this committee, that this be rolled out across the country. So give us your recommendation.
Academic Director, Lecturer, Business Edge, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Thank you very much.
We're now in our seventh or eighth offering of this program, and as you can imagine, over time we have improved it.
One thing we were asked to do by the partners of the women—which is rather curious—and have done was develop a program for men, because they were a bit disconcerted, I think in a positive way, that their partners, who were having a fabulous learning opportunity, were learning some things that the men wished they had known. So we keep our program somewhat integrated between men and women, but we also have separate sections. For example, we have separate sections on communication, because there are some different communication style issues and so on.
The program in short is approximately six months long. It involves both in-class activities and a lot of coaching from the career coaches and the language coaches, as I mentioned. But also we do a lot of peer coaching. We find that creating small communities—groups of about eight or ten in which people are basically coaching themselves and their colleagues—is extremely effective.
We take in approximately 45 people per session. We are now able to run the program twice a year. We are very fortunate to have received considerable funding from the provincial government. The participants pay basically as they can. We ask a very nominal fee to sign up, but we also provide a number of scholarships. So we try to do what we can to make sure that in no way is it cost-prohibitive. We're keen to open up as broadly as we can. We certainly don't want to feel that we're only, as it were, reaching out to internationally educated professionals who can pay. We're interested in reaching out to all internationally educated professionals who for whatever reason are underemployed or are perhaps just not moving anywhere.
We find that promotion is also an indicator of success. Quite often, within the six-month period participants will go from even an okay job to one that is perhaps even better than the one they had in their country of origin. So we measure our success in terms of promotion.
We continue to be actively connected to all of our participants, using typical business tools such as LinkedIn and so on. We have a strong alumni network, and we call upon its members quite frequently to be ambassadors for the program. Also, for example, one of our participants is now a coach in the program. As you can well imagine, as he himself is an internationally educated professional who was able to go from one excellent job to an even more excellent job, he is both a role model and an ambassador, and he also has direct and immediate connection with our participants. So we look at success in terms of personal development.
The one that's a little harder to measure is the degree of change in confidence. I certainly won't wax anecdotal about it, but suffice it to say, over the years I have been involved in the program I have seen a development of confidence between day one and six months later that I think is absolutely jaw-dropping. It's really helpful and exciting, because these are people who are going to go out and make the difference in the workplace.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Professor Armstrong, you've talked about how the program works, how you measure success, and that you're able to take in 90 people a year and that this is how it's growing, which is terrific. What is the need out there?
Academic Director, Lecturer, Business Edge, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, As an Individual
I don't know that I can calculate it, but based on the number of people who apply to our programs, we absolutely can't take everyone because the timing is perhaps not right in terms of where they are personally, or we simply have limited capacity. But everyone goes through a rigorous interview process to make sure they're at the right stage, both personally and in their career. But given the demand we have that we can't meet, if I could extrapolate that across the country, particularly in large urban centres that welcome many new Canadians, I'd guess we wouldn't have a problem having demand. The problem is actually having the supply to meet the demand from people who need our kind of course.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
So what would you like to see the recommendation be in the report?
Academic Director, Lecturer, Business Edge, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, As an Individual
I'm glad to connect with the committee so that you can get more detailed insight into what we do, but I would be really thrilled if, after your lens of critique, you recommended that something along the lines of what we are doing and largely piloting, and I think are pioneering, be run across the country. I think we'd be pleased by that, but it really doesn't matter. What really matters is that you, through your recommendation, would be providing a program that, like ours as a long-term pilot, is successful, has traction, is scalable, and could be tweaked to meet the demands of particular cities—and, certainly, rural areas as well.
That would be my real hope, that something along the lines of what we do, with the sort of changes you think appropriate, be recommended to go across our country.
Academic Director, Lecturer, Business Edge, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, As an Individual
You're very welcome.
NDP
Conservative
Joan Crockatt Conservative Calgary Centre, AB
Thank you, madam.
Thank you very much for being here, professor. I'm simply electrified listening to you, because I can see what a wonderful inspiration you must be to these women. I think that is exactly what they need.
You are probably aware that we've put together this expert panel on women's leadership that has been meeting under the direction of Kelly Leitch. They're focusing exactly on the things that you are actually implementing. So it's great for me to hear how you're doing that and I think that our research has been showing that 88% of entrepreneurs with mentors survive in business, compared to a 50% failure rate if they don't have a mentor. Obviously, that seems to be one of the great areas that we need to continue to work in.
The Calgary Immigrant Women's Association has an interesting program in which they mentor immigrant women in the workplace as kind of a job-training aspect. Do you do that, or do you recommend that?
Academic Director, Lecturer, Business Edge, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, As an Individual
I think that's a really great idea. We try to do a little bit of job shadowing and so on, once the program is over. But I think the closer the tie-in between the mentorship and the person being mentored in a real situation, namely the workplace, the more effective it will be.
We're basically a bridging program and it would be awesome to partner with programs that move from kind of the bridging aspect into the workplace.
Conservative
Joan Crockatt Conservative Calgary Centre, AB
Okay, that's valuable too.
I think in the one they do in Calgary, they are paid, but they are in an internship position. So you actually recommend their getting into the job market and picking someone in the organization who has a stake in their future and vice versa.
Academic Director, Lecturer, Business Edge, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Absolutely.
Conservative
Joan Crockatt Conservative Calgary Centre, AB
Okay. That's great.
I was also really fascinated with your talking about whether we should be mentoring men, because I had made a little note about that just before you said it. I think we understand the case for mentoring immigrant men, new Canadians, because the practices here are quite different and they might have to adjust to their wife being in a different role here.
Do you recommend mentoring men who not new Canadians? Do we need any programs that are actually targeted at them, or are we beyond that now?
