Human resource professionals are often well aware of the value of immigrant talent to business. But they need help to build that awareness in their organizations, and need tools and resources to help them improve recruitment, retention and talent management strategies.

TRIEC has worked with employers to develop and build learning solutions for them. As a first step, it researched “promising practices” among employers that were successful in attracting and retaining top immigrant talent. As more practices, strategies and tools were identified, these were organized and compiled as an “employer roadmap” – a tool to allow employers to explore ideas and examples of practices, following a lifecycle approach to human resources.

As a strategy to reach out and provide learning opportunities to employers, TRIEC also created workshops that used much of the content of the “roadmap” but were delivered by community colleges. As a key curriculum resource to these workshops, TRIEC has developed training videos that address recruiting, integration and cross-cultural teamwork. Two of these videos are dramatic productions that follow one immigrant’s journey to finding a job and his experiences in the first months on the job. Each video also comes with downloadable discussion guides. These videos have proven to be valuable resources for immigrant-serving agencies offering training to skilled immigrants who are looking to integrate successfully into Canadian organizations.

To make workshops and other resources and learning opportunities more easily available to employers, TRIEC is designing an e-learning platform, and is converting the workshops into a series of online learning modules. This platform will become a clearinghouse of curriculum, resources and training opportunities to support employers and service providers – an employer campus. The campus is based on an open source model for sharing and customization of learning resources, and will include a train-the-trainer model to ensure that resources can be effectively used internally by employers and service providers.

The Employer Roadmap resides on hireimmigrants.ca, a website created by TRIEC and now hosted by ALLIES, a national network of immigrant employment councils. The roadmap has been embedded in websites of three provincial governments and twelve municipalities.

TRIEC’s training videos are popular. Available on multiple websites, the videos have been viewed almost 30,000 times and downloaded more than 2,200 times.

Workshops have been delivered to 400 employers. Beginning in 2011, workshops are available to Toronto region employers on a fee-for-service basis, delivered by two local colleges.