Highly skilled immigrants’ strategies for successful career transitions
After a successful year as an MSc student, Dunja Palic fast-tracked into the PhD in Management program. Now in her fourth year, she is excited to share what she and her supervisors, Luciara Nardon and Amrita Hari, have learned about the integration of highly skilled immigrants.
Growing up in an immigrant family, Dunja Palic was always aware of the challenges her parents faced trying to establish careers in Canada. Later on, as an undergraduate business student, she found herself drawn to courses that focused on cultural sensitivity and the intersection of business and culture. Given this combination of personal experience and academic interest, immigrant integration was a natural subject for her to explore in her doctoral research.
Three distinct projects coalesce in her program of study. The first project, which focuses on the Transnational sensemaking narratives of highly skilled Canadian immigrants’ career change, challenges the common assumption that career change is inherently negative. Based on their analysis of nine in-depth, qualitative interviews, Dunja and her supervisors identified four distinct career transition narratives. Of those, only one (the mourning the past narrative) maps a declining career trajectory that portrays career change as a negative by-product of migration. The others showcase a variety of proactive strategies that highly skilled immigrants can use to shape their careers and understand their evolving professional identities. One (the starting fresh narrative) goes so far as to characterize immigration as a door to professional opportunities that were unavailable in the country of origin.
The second project draws upon the same dataset, but shifts the analytical focus to the temporal nature of migration and career transition. It also focuses on a different aspect of the data. Whereas the first study was informed primarily by participants’ narratives and interview transcripts, the second is based largely on drawings made by participants while they were reflecting on their career transitions. This project is still in progress, but has already yielded an interesting finding:
“A lot of participants perceived their past careers as being with them in the present despite a career transition.”
Moreover, preliminary analysis suggests that participants who could see continuity between their past and present work were more likely to feel comfortable in their new career and to view it as a reflection of their professional identity. Dunja plans to collect additional interview data as this project progresses.
Drawing upon a new dataset, the third and final project calls for a paradigm shift in how researchers approach the topic of immigrant career change. “There’s not very much research looking at immigrants’ career success, and much of the research that does tends to focus on challenges as opposed to success factors.” In light of the literature’s dominant ‘problem orientation,’ Dunja wants to draw attention to positive, lifegiving factors.
“We’re very aware of the problems that exist. We know about only a fraction of the resources, and not very much even about those. I want to raise awareness about and develop an understanding of the resources skilled immigrants are actually using to facilitate professional success.”
Doing this work under her supervisors’ guidance, Dunja hopes to be able to inform counselors and employers about things that help immigrants integrate within Canada’s workforce.
This shift from a problem to a positive orientation also contributes to the realization of one of Dunja’s main goals: to give immigrants voice while positioning them as active agents of change rather than as individuals who are at the whim of various institutional barriers. “These are capable people who can make decisions that benefit themselves and their careers.” Researchers, for their part, can contribute to that process by making a case for resources that people need to be aware of and by ensuring those resources are accessible to immigrants.
