Maytree Conversations

Mentoring relationships can be rewarding. However, if you’re the kind of mentor who assumes that you need to have answers and solutions to any question, issue or need your mentee might have, a mentorship can also be intimidating. What if you were to approach your mentoring relationship as a dynamic connection and opportunity for both mentee and mentor learn and grow? What if you considered the experience as a networking opportunity for both of you?

There are many resources, stories, tips and information focused on enhancing networking skills of mentees. Less common are those that include tips for mentors.

At a Five Good Ideas session, Lisa Mattam shared her ideas about Successful Networking. Her excellent and practical advice is certainly useful to a very broad audience. There are however, specific tips of particular benefit to mentors. Here are five.

1. Look both ways: mentoring is not a one way street.
   While the goal of your relationship might be to enhance the career options for your mentee, remember that they too are connected to networks that may be beneficial for you. Keep focused on the mentoring goal but take the opportunity to express your interests and needs. People appreciate helping as much as they do being helped.
2. Consider unlikely connections.
   If your mentee is researching a particular field, think beyond your direct connections to individuals in that field. For example, parents of your childrens’ friends may be great network hubs. Your squash club may also be an opportunity to explore potential new connections on behalf of your mentee. Asking on behalf of someone else is often easier than asking for ourselves and generally, people are delighted to help.
3. Learn from other mentors.
   If you have been paired with a mentee by an organization or mentoring program such as The Mentoring Partnership, consider asking to be linked with another mentor if you have specific questions or situations you are struggling with, or would simply like to connect around the experience of being a mentor.
4. Remember your etiquette.
   Any network is only as strong as its weakest link. If you are connecting your mentee to someone, it is important to ask for that individual’s permission before sharing contact information. Once you have their permission, an e-mail to both parties with a call to action (usually to the mentee) is an appropriate way to proceed. A follow up e-mail thanking the individual to whom you have made the request is also not a bad idea.
5. Establish your own mentors.
   The mentoring relationship often requires a combination of counseling, supporting and using influence to help others. You may have strong skills in these areas, but you may also need guidance. Establish your own network of informal mentors which may help you develop these competencies.

Related links:

• A new mentor’s story
• Mentoring – Many Places, Many Forms
• Mentoring – Help a Newcomer, Help Yourself
• The City of Calgary Benefits from Mentoring Skilled Immigrants (Video)
• Mentoring is a Two-Way Street (Success Story)

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On day one of the ALLIES conference (May 5, 2011), participants spent the afternoon in roundtable discussions on particular issues related to mentoring programs for skilled immigrant professionals.

Here is a quick report of the ideas that emerged:

1.    Intercultural Communication

• Cross-cultural competencies are important for both groups, not just for mentees. Each side needs to develop those skills equally. Change needs to come from both sides
• Need for a toolkit on how to prepare small and medium  enterprises to deal with intercultural communication issues.

2.    Job  Readiness for Mentees

• Communicate Canadian employers’ expectations on English language level pre-immigration.
• Activities need to be developed to manage expectations of both mentees and mentors on what job readiness entails.

3.    Building Partnerships

• Beg, borrow and steal. Use what has worked in other programs and adapt it to your context.
• Establish a common front for employers.
• Allow for coordination among multiple funding bodies to avoid competition where there should be collaboration on the field.
• Engage several stakeholders: small and medium enterprises, private and public sectors, industry sectors, targeting high-growth industries that are in high demand and recruiting. In these partnerships there must be a range of diversity, a level of expertise.
• Each stakeholder’s expectations must be clear.
• Constant follow-up is important for partnerships. This entails resources.

4.    Mentoring for Regulated Professions

• Embed mentoring into professional development plans for mentors who come from employer partners.
• Offer e-mentoring pre-arrival from professionals within the regulated professions.
• Work with regulatory bodies to embed mentoring as a qualifier for their members professional development and re-certification credits.

5.    Marketing

• Marketing for Mentees: connect with mentees through ethnic organisations, faith organisations, public library talks, and before they get to Canada (for example through IPSO).
• Marketing to employers: set up an advisory committee of initial employer champions who can recruit other employers to the program. “Speak to the choir first.”

6.    Pre-mentoring and post-mentoring activities to make mentoring more successful

• Structure – Setting and communicating goals and expectations (for all partners, community, clients, employers, etc.) and having clear deliverables.
• Sharing of ideas, best practices, feedback and evaluation.
• Recognition – mentoring alumni events, awards, testimonials and media outreach.
• Sharing success stories – impacts on corporate partner, mentees, mentors and funders; understanding of program potential and impact
• Networking activities around the mentoring program.
• Understand what employers need and want – it informs design and success of program.

7.    Professional Development for Mentors

• Joint activities can be developed by employers in collaboration with Immigrant Employment Councils.
• Co-development groups to allow mentors to share with other mentors.
• Recognise the professional development provided during the mentoring program with a certificate or an acknowledgement in the mentor’s development plan. Mentoring needs to be embedded in performance management plans by corporations.

8.    Evaluation

• Establishing shared criteria with all agencies to track mentoring on several other data but numbers.
• A shared platforms to gather up and share knowledge.
• In one program, mentees did presentations to mentors: the whole program heard from the persons for whom the work is intended.
• Network mapping: capture connections to ensure that networks have been enhanced through mentoring.
• Extending evaluation period to four months to a year after the end of the mentoring relationship to assess longer-term impacts.

Find out more from Day one (yesterday) of the ALLIES conference.

Building on local successes: learning and leading

On May 5 and 6, ALLIES held a mentoring conference in Calgary to celebrate the successes of current mentoring initiatives. Participants shared their experiences, explored new opportunities, and continued to build mentoring initatives that impact the lives of skilled immigrants and local employers across the country.

A full report about what was learned at the conference will be released by the beginning of June and will be available on the ALLIES website.

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I began my career at Maytree over ten years ago as I was completing my graduate studies. My professor at the time recommended me to assist in a research project led by Maytree. The rest is history! I continue to gain tremendous professional experience at Maytree by working on various projects using my research, communications and event management skills.

I decided that it was time for me to support an individual just like my professor did. Given my work and personal interests, I wanted to see how I might be able to help a newcomer to Canada. Skilled immigrants have the education, experience, and language skills needed to succeed in the Canadian labour market. But what I can help them with is to get insights into the local industry and access to professional networks.

I’m doing this through TRIEC’s The Mentoring Partnership. A few months after registering, I was matched with a newly arrived immigrant in the public relations/communications field. I was very excited!

And so began my new adventure

My coach, from a local immigrant serving agency, gave me an orientation that outlined my role and provided a guide to activities that my mentee and I could work on together. These ideas included reviewing a resume, cover letter, conducting a mock-interview and suggesting industry events she could attend. Later, after determining her career goals, I could introduce her to my network and invite her to “job shadow” me at Maytree to see what my typical day looks like.

I’m looking forward to that.

Our first meeting!

As you can imagine I was nervous yet excited to meet my mentee. I was curious about what she expected from me, in terms of support.

We had a fantastic introductory meeting!

We shared our professional backgrounds and experiences. By the end of our first meeting, I think I had learned more than she did.

For example, I learned how selecting speakers for Chinese special events are conducted. This made me rethink some of my decision-making when it comes to developing an event. In turn, I shared some of the thinking that goes into selecting a venue for our major conference. We decided that at our next meeting we would review her resume and cover letter.

I’m very happy I can support her through this journey. I consider my mentee a very brave individual. There are many challenges and experiences she will be navigating through as a newcomer to Canada. I hope that I will play a small, but effective role in her successful journey to becoming a successful Canadian professional!

Related links:

• The Mentoring Partnership
• ALLIES National Mentoring Initiative
• Integrating Talent video
• Mentoring: An Important Strategy to Open the Canadian Labour Market to New Immigrants
• Mentoring series

Valeisha Sobhee, Coordinator of Programs, National Mentoring Initiative, ALLIES

Mentoring is more than just matchmaking. It’s a deliberate way to open up new networks for skilled immigrants in their fields of expertise. It is a process that starts with the right occupation-specific match, builds a relationship over time, and can lead to gainful employment.

Growing out of the success of TRIEC’s Mentoring Partnership, the ALLIES National Mentoring Initiative is working with communities across Canada to build, implement and ramp up skilled immigrant mentoring projects.

Our City Partners

Currently, nine cities in our network across Canda have mentoring programs for newcomers:

• Halifax
• Montreal
• Ottawa
• Toronto
• Waterloo Region
• London
• Calgary
• Edmonton
• Vancouver

What we bring to our city partners are, among other things, a mentoring model, a workable approach, technical support, as well as connections to our national employer partners. Along with our important partner work and consultation with local communities, we have built a replication model for leaders interested in bringing mentoring to their city.

Our partners have connections with local employers (which can lead to national connections & relationships in other partner cities), immigrants, immigrant-serving agencies and municipal leadership, which are key to the success of these initiatives.

Our Employer Partners

No immigrant employment solution, such as mentoring, would succeed without visionary employers.

Employers that partner with us to provide mentors to the program across Canada realize that mentoring fosters new leadership skills in their staff, provides exposure to the realities of immigrant talent and offers the possibility to tap into a new talent pool.

Our national employer partners across the country are actively working on solutions to employ skilled immigrants. They have also identified senior local leaders in their organizations to drive local solutions and to create, develop and participate in local immigrant employment councils.

Watch Rob Brouwer, Canadian Managing Partner, Markets at KPMG, comment about skilled immigrant talent at KPMG.

Interested in exploring a mentoring program in your company? In your city?

Let us help you. You can start now by:

• Reading and viewing our mentoring resources (including useful pointers and videos);
• Perusing our online mentoring toolkit; and
• Finding out more about our relationships with national employers in your community.

Related links:

• ALLIES Canada
• hireimmigrants.ca
• Mentoring: An Important Strategy to Open the Canadian Labour Market to New Immigrants

Through our ALLIES  project, we’re working with organizations across Canada to build local strength in mentoring programs. Our National Mentoring Initiative promotes mentoring from coast to coast as a proven strategy for skilled immigrants to integrate into the labour market (more specifics about the National Mentoring Initiative will come in a future post).

Vancouver’s mentoring initiative is the latest to launch. Our partner, the Immigrant Employment Council of British Columbia (IECBC), along with local partners, launched a new mentoring initiative with the City of Vancouver.

Our partner in Calgary, the Calgary Region Immigrant Employment Council (CRIEC), put this great video together to promote its mentoring initiative:

This past week also saw a great Toronto Star article about the importance and effectiveness of mentoring newcomer youth - Low-profile mentoring program gets results: “The program has carried on quietly for five years, keeping a low profile; but its results have been miraculous. None of the 300-odd teens who participated in the program have dropped out of school. Their grades have gone from low C’s and D’s to high B’s and, in some cases, A’s. And many have gone on to college and university.”

We like the sound of that.

In many ways, good mentoring is about building and sustaining networks. Our recent Five Good Ideas workshop, led by Lisa Mattam, provides an excellent overview of Knowing How to Work the Room – Strategies for Successful Networking.

Watch her mentor a room of over 100 people:

In the United States, January is National Mentoring Month. While this hasn’t officially caught on in Canada, we think it is a great opportunity to talk about mentoring skilled immigrants.

The Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) opened this year with a New Year’s Resolution – “If you need a resolution to inspire and motivate you, consider becoming a mentor with The Mentoring Partnership.”

We agree and we’ll spend the next couple of weeks highlighting the importance and effectiveness of mentoring skilled immigrants, and why you want to be a part of it. We’ll share some stories about mentoring, give you a sense of what’s happening across the country, spotlight some innovative employers who are leading the way, including three municipalities, and help you find your place as a mentor.

Does mentoring work? Is it successful?

We think so.

Recently, TRIEC’s Mentoring Partnership recognized 27 employers for their support. Since 2004 over 5,300 skilled immigrants have been mentored by Toronto professionals; most by staff of corporate partners. Read their stories.

Is it a rewarding experience?

On Twitter, Julia Deans, CEO of Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance, says yes.

Watch the video below to get a sense of what it means to be a mentor.

Stay with us for the next couple of weeks and we’ll show you the power of mentoring.

While recent immigrants to Canada are more highly educated than previous cohorts and the Canadian-born, they earn lower wages and have more difficulties entering the labour market. At a time when we are competing in a global economy, Canada has clearly not leveraged this talent into innovation and productivity.

As we saw with the release of Canada’s Vital Signs 2010 earlier this week, recent immigrants with a university education had an unemployment rate that was 4.1 times higher (13.9%) that that of Canadian-born workers with a university degree (3.4%), according to 2009 data.

There is no doubt immigrants to Canada are unemployed and underemployed. About 65% who arrived in the 1990s experienced a low-income period, and about one-fifth had chronic low incomes. In the most recent recession, immigrants were disproportionally affected.  Many of the newly unemployed were immigrants who had taken jobs in the manufacturing sector because their skills and experience were not recognized in Canada. They now find themselves even further from their original career goals.

One of the main factors that explains the gap between employment rates for recent skilled immigrants and their Canadian-born counterparts is the lack of social and professional networks that new immigrants have in their new home.

Now that the economy is hopefully improving, this means that they have no access to the hidden job market, including job openings that are not advertised. Depending on where they worked and how long they’ve been in the country, recent immigrants may also lack an understanding of the Canadian workplace culture and find it hard to have their international qualifications recognized.

However, more and more community organizations and employers offer programs to overcome these deficits. In particular, mentoring has shown itself to be a proven strategy as it connects a skilled immigrant with an established Canadian professional in the same or related occupation.

It’s not just the mentee who benefits – it’s a two-way street. Mentees benefit by the expert advice and connections that mentors provide – it is their bridge to becoming Canadian professionals. Mentor benefit by developing their leadership and coaching skills in addition to enhancing their ability to lead diverse teams.

The success of mentoring is demonstrable. In a study of The Mentoring Partnership in Toronto, you can see the difference that mentoring made to the individuals who participated:

• Almost 80% of mentees found work;
• There was a 67% increase in income for the mentee; and
• 95% of all mentors said they would hire a skilled immigrant.

A mentoring program is also advantageous to the participating employers. Among other benefits, it:

• Helps identify hidden talent by bringing employers in touch with qualified candidates;
• Provides a learning opportunity for staff ; and
• Recognizes volunteerism and helps gain greater visibility in the community.

Employers can be an active part of this process by providing mentors in one or more cities across Canada. Mentoring programs for newcomers exist in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, London, Kitchener-Waterloo, Niagara, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. Visit the ALLIES website to learn more about getting involved with mentoring.

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Peter Paul is the project leader of ALLIES, a project jointly funded by Maytree and The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation. ALLIES (Assisting Local Leaders with Immigrant Employment Strategies) supports local efforts in Canadian cities to successfully adapt and implement programs that further the suitable employment of skilled immigrants.