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Education/training

Practice makes perfect for immigrant women

Got the training, but no experience? Look no further, Working Skills Centre (WSC), Toronto's longest running immigrant women's training school, started up the Practice Firm earlier this year to address that very issue.

NOREEN FAROOQUI

[ 2006-04-19 ]

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HUI
Working Skills Centre

A Practice Firm is a simulated business environment. All the operations typical of a real business take place within the Practice Firm but no money or products are exchanged. The Practice Firm transacts business with other virtual businesses.

Quebec opened the first Practice Firm in Canada in 1995. Since then, the concept has spread throughout the country with firms in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Ontario and British Columbia. There are now more than 40 Practice Firms in Canada and more than 4,000 firms internationally.

Minerva Hui, executive director at WSC says, "It's actually a very good model for people who don't have a very strong labour market attachment. That's why it works really well with our immigrant women's training."

The Practice Firm model has been used on different target groups including youth who traditionally have a harder time entering the labour market. It has proven to be an effective model, serving as a bridge between the two worlds of schooling and work.

At WSC, the Practice Firm gives immigrant women much-needed Canadian work experience -- one of the biggest barriers to procuring full-time employment in this country.

With 27 years of helping women become economically independent behind its belt, WSC is hard at work on providing the appropriate accommodations for the Practice Firm. They are currently revamping their offices to fit their virtual business.

"At the moment we're doing the renovations to separate the Working Skills training side of things," Hui says. It's going to have its own receptions, its own phones. There's going to be up to 17 people for a maximum of 12 weeks. The women will work partly at their work and partly at their job search."

The simulated work environment of the Practice Firm will build on WSCs existing logistics program. The Centre's commercial concept is freight forwarding or the trade of goods locally, nationally or internationally. The logistics sector is considered an ideal fit for immigrant clients specifically as their first language skills are valued, especially when communicating with international trading partners.

"We're going to be virtually shipping from one Practice Firm to another, generating forms and providing quotes. This is a great continuum within WSC because we provide practical training with our logistics, and now we'll give them a chance to practice those skills," Hui says.

Like any business, the Practice Firm will make use of people with skills in various backgrounds including accounting and IT.

"We do the business transactions with the other Practice Firms. We are going to start with Canada first and then move on internationally," Hui says.

Qualified candidates for the WSC Practice Firm will need referrals from the HRSDC assessment centres.

"Candidates will be trained and ready to go to work in the positions they want to be hired in," Hui says. "They're job ready but they don't have the work experience."

For further information on the Logistics Practice firm at Working Skills Centre, visit www.workingskillscentre.com/index.html, or call Christina Chu at 416-703-7770 or e-mail her at cchu@workingskillscentre.com.

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