What happens is that they take a few courses at a time, so that they can put them on their resumé, and they go and compete for jobs. In Canada, an accent can be a blessing or a curse. It's always in the eye of the beholder to take the responsibility to gauge the skills and language proficiency of people whom they are interviewing for jobs, and to assess the skills of foreign-trained people for those jobs. Very frequently, people who do interviews focus on one or the other more than is favourable for the immigrant women—and men, for that matter—to successfully compete for jobs.
Transitioning, providing culturally sensitive supports in preparing them to upgrade their skills and present them in what we call a Canadian acceptable way, is really sometimes an art. Very frequently, it takes a tiny sliver of measure by the interviewer to discard an excellent candidate with foreign training in favour of a Canadian-born candidate.
Biases experienced in interviews are documented. Obviously, nobody does it deliberately, but biases do exist. Settlement support, even for highly educated immigrants, is essential for the speed of their ability to integrate and for their expeditious involvement in the workplace.
We have clients who come to us after completing university courses to do our programs.