Canadian immigrants are overqualified and underemployed — reforms must address this.
Blaming newcomers — particularly international students and their spouses — for job shortages overlooks deeper structural issues in the labour market.
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I worked with a guy in a city job in Alberta that was a good damned engineer. Built all these crazy infrastructure projects in his home country. A good one I imagine cause he's smart as fuck and I mean huge projects for energy generation. This dude, cleaning bathrooms at a hockey rink cause he's not qualified here and going to trade school to be a carpenter so he can just build stuff. Insane.
Happened to one my mom's husbands. Dude was a electrical engineer and was working the froze fish scene because his degree meant nothing
And the sad reality is that there is an international accreditation board and their schools don't meet that standard.
It is the fault of their home countries that their schools don't meet that standard.
We cannot and should never compromise high standards of education.
I don't disagree that we shouldn't compromise our standards, but a school based accreditation process doesn't allow for any sort of individual appeals process. (ie. Doctor "a", who is really talented, gets universally shafted because he comes from a school that was deemed "unfit", even though he himself could blow any of our accreditation tests out of the water)
Let the specialists come here and fast track an accreditation instead of saying "sorry...you school sucked, welcome to Tim Hortons."
The schools in Canada don't set the accreditation standards. They have to meet it or they can't hand out those certifications for here.
That's what I mean. We should give the individual a fast-tracked opportunity to prove that they can meet those standards instead of blanket rejection because they came from a school that did not.
For example, if I...at 48 years old...decided to return to University for a marketing degree, I have the opportunity to audit a number of my classes based on my own life experience. I can preemptively take the applicable tests to prove that I don't need to take the class again. It's a fast track based on the fact that I've spent the last 25 years of my life working at least tangentially in marketing, so that has to count for something.
There's no reason that they can't do a similar thing with skilled specialists who happen to come from so-called "sub-standard" schools. Test them and audit them on an individual basis rather than just telling them "too bad".
It is the fault of their home countries that their schools don’t meet that standard.
We cannot and should never compromise high standards of education.
These two things are generally unrelated. Higher education institutions around the world don't have many incentives to get these accreditation stamps in the first place, and it's mostly bureaucracy, nothing to do with the actual standards of these institutions. My engineering degree was much, MUCH harder to get than it it would have been in Canada. The bar to graduate at my uni is way higher than the average university here - but in the end it's a pile of paperwork that no one cares to make it easier.
A friend of mine is finishing his 3 year journey towards his P Eng and it's insane to think that the quality of his education has anything to do with this, it's one of the best engineering schools of the continent.
And not being given the opportunity to prove that they have the education because of "professional" associations is the reason so many are working dead end jobs and we lack the people in educated positions.
I never mentioned a part of the world or a skin colour.
If the school isn't accredited, then it should not count. I expect the same when I leave Canada to work in other countries; I check first.
