Like generations of immigrants before him, Mohammad Bajwa, MBA, has taken a “survival job” – as a part-time night security guard – while he looks for a position in banking.
A man in a hurry, Mr. Bajwa, 45, used the quiet times after midnight to study for the Canadian Securities Course, hunkered over his books at the security desk in the lobby of the downtown Toronto condominium where he works.
And although he has been in Canada only a little more than three months, Mr. Bajwa passed the securities course. Now he is anxious to move on.
“Back home I had a very good job. I was working for a commercial bank, one of the biggest international banks in Pakistan …in the internal audit department.”
Following in the footsteps of countless others, Mr. Bajwa left everything behind to come to Canada – via Australia, where he earned his MBA – in search of a better future for his four children.
“Here, education is free. That was the most attractive part for me, the kids' education. Canada is a good country, it's a beautiful country with beautiful people. It's more peaceful and, so far, my opinion is that there is no racism in Canada,” Mr. Bajwa said in an interview after a ceremony to mark his graduation from a “financial services connections” program sponsored by Toronto-based ACCES employment services, a non-profit agency that specializes in the placement of immigrants.
“That's why I decided to come to Canada.”
For the short-term, he doesn't mind that he has to work as a security guard to feed the kids, Mr. Bajwa said. “But it would be difficult for me to just continue with an odd job for a long time.”
Like so many others – professional engineers delivering pizzas, mathematicians working as custodians, PhDs driving taxis – Mr. Bajwa hopes to work his way back into a position comparable to what he had in Pakistan.
“Everything revolves around your job. If you have a job, you can run the show.”
Mr. Bajwa, who is fluent in English, Urdu and Punjabi, has some reason for optimism.
Through the financial services connections program, he has already been interviewed by two of the major Canadian chartered banks. A third bank has contacted ACCES with a request to interview all of its graduates within a few weeks.
Canada takes in more than 250,000 immigrants a year, and according to a recent report by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, the majority do not land work in the fields for which they trained. This is slowly changing as the labour market tightens.
“Although six out of 10 skilled immigrants may be deemed downwardly mobile, their skills underutilized, four out of 10 find appropriate employment – some independently, and some through intervention,” the study's authors found.
It is incredibly frustrating for skilled professionals to be unemployed, or underemployed, in Canada because their educational credentials are not recognized or because they have no Canadian experience, according to career experts who specialize in finding suitable employment for qualified immigrants.
Still, there are success stories, especially as more Canadian employers, concerned about skill shortages, take a closer look at this new source of talent.
Career Bridge, a non-profit organization that places skilled professionals in internships with Canadian employers, cites some examples of immigrants who started in survival jobs, but later moved into solid, full-time careers: the man with a master's degree in engineering who started as a laundry worker before eventually landing work as a water main and sewer engineer; the immigrants with postgraduate degrees in finance who now work as financial analysts, having first taken survival jobs loading trucks and working in coffee shops; the MBA who started as an assembly-line worker and now works as a hospital vendor administrator.
Mr. Bajwa's language skills are solid and, prior to leaving Pakistan, he was moving up the ranks at Habib Bank Ltd., where he started as a credit and collections officer. Later, as a member of the internal audit team, he conducted audits of nearly 250 domestic and 25 overseas branches of the bank in such locations as Lebanon, Dubai and Bahrain. When he left the bank in 2007, Mr. Bajwa was an audit team leader.
What he lacks, however, is Canadian experience.
“It's difficult to just break that barrier,” he said.
“Once you get in there, you can demonstrate your skills, your abilities.
“You can show the people, ‘this is who I am.' You can just prove yourself.”
