Voies vers la prospérité: Canada

THE OPPORTUNITY
At the federal level, Canada has embarked on an aggressive immigration strategy to attract young and talented newcomers. A major component of Canada’s immigration strategy is to attract international students and provide post-graduate work permits to facilitate alumni seeking permanent residency. This approach is desirable because it attracts educated youth who contribute to local economies while they earn a post-secondary credential and, at the same time, they become more fluent with Canadian official languages, cultural norms, and hopefully stay, work, and succeed in Canada.

The weakest link in this post-secondary education to citizenship chain is the school to employment transition. A recent Statistics Canada report, “Early earnings trajectories of international students after graduation from postsecondary programs,” {Ref. 1} revealed that international students and alumni (ISA) have more difficulty finding appropriate employment, and the share of international graduates with positive earnings was approximately 33 percentage points lower than that of Canadian citizen graduates. This situation represents a serious problem for ISA individuals and their families, as well as being a critical waste of human capital and productivity for the nation.

THE CHALLENGE(S)
Where there is opportunity, there is challenge, and visa versa. In this case, the challenge stems from a perfect storm of circumstances: 1) rapid international student growth, 2) lack of resources, and 3) a steeper learning curve for students and employers.

Rapid growth typically stresses any system, and since 2016 Canada has increased international student first time study permit holders by 66% {Ref. 2} . During the 2017/2018 academic year, 14.7% and 13.2% of all university and college enrolments, respectively, were international. This rapid growth has run headlong into already overstressed career services. Thirty years ago, career services were really conceived as an afterthought, an extracurricular value-added service with little integration into the academic institutional mission. This situation has improved; however, as the practice and the resources grew, so too has demand {Ref. 3} .

For higher education career services, this unprecedented rapid growth on top of already stretched resources is further compounded by the reality that international students face more career development challenges, on average, than do domestic students. This intuitive reality was validated in a recent poll of career services professionals in which we found that ISA can require an average of 3.5 hours of support for every 1 hour for a typical domestic student {Ref. 4}.

WORKING TOWARD SOLUTIONS
With a combined 60 years of experience in higher education student affairs, international, and employment services, we knew that ISA would benefit most from additional supports in 3 areas: 1) education in career development skills, 2) support and encouragement, and 3) employer connections.

Devant.ca {Ref. 5} was purpose built to address these three challenges. We determined that the essential opportunity was to leverage technology to combine resources and build various economies of scale and network effect for the express purpose of helping ISA with career development.

Working with career development practitioners and former international students, we built the Devant Student and Alumni Career Development platform to be accessible to both individuals and higher education institutions. Launched in November 2021, the platform is designed to provide students/alumni with continuous and 24/7 access to a full suite of career readiness content of video-based tutorials developed by experts for ISA.

To help build interest and engagement, these resources are complemented with regular (weekly) live events which enable us to bring in sector experts, talent acquisition professionals, and employers who interact with students through presentations and workshops.

To help increase networking and exposure to employers, Devant hosts free national career fairs exclusively for ISA (next big event is February 2, 2022), and monthly Expert Panels where we invite employers to share exciting careers in their fields and offer webinars free to employers to help explain immigration pathways and increase awareness of this vast talent pool – Canada’s international students and alumni.

Now that the platform is launched and has over 8500 student/alumni subscribers, we plan to grow ISA opportunities through partnerships with post-secondary institutions, employers, and others across Canada who can help international students to stay, work, and succeed.

Please don’t hesitate to connect to either of us to learn more or explore possibilities.
Rod Skinkle, Co-Founder, President and CEO of Academica Group
Denis Gravelle, Co-Founder, Stakeholder Engagement and Content Development

———— References ———–
1. Early earnings trajectories of international students after graduation from postsecondary programs, Stats Canada, Youjin Choi, Feng Hou and Ping Ching Winnie Chan, Release date: February 24, 2021
2. International students as a source of labour supply: The growing number of international students and their changing sociodemographic characteristics, Stats Canada, Eden Crossman, Youjin Choi and Feng Hou. Release date: July 28, 2021https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2021007/article/00005-eng.htm
3. Dietsche P,Lees J, Insight into Canadian Post-Secondary Career Service Models, Final Report, Table 3, 2016 , https://ceric.ca/projects/insight-into-canadian-post-secondary-career-service-models/
4. Gravelle D., BMRC Presentation, York University, December 2019
5. Devant is a division of Academica Group Inc.