WATCH: A job fair was held in Moncton Thursday to help new Canadians find work. As Global’s Shelley Steeves reports, several hundred immigrants attended the job fair with hope of finding permanent work.
MONCTON – A job fair was held in Moncton today to help new Canadians find work. The event exposes new immigrants to the wide array of available career and educational opportunities that exist in the Greater Moncton area.
Lisa Bui moved to Moncton from Vietnam in 2011 . She attended today’s job fair hoping to get her foot in the door at a local call centre.
“My background I was working for Nike in Vietnam for 16 years in human resource and administrations,” Bui said.
Bui graduated from human resource management at the New Brunswick Community College last month. She says she’s looking for an entry level job that will allow her to stay in New Brunswick.
“I moved here with my family, I have three children.”
Moncton’s Immigration Strategy Officer, Angelique Reddy-Kalala is hoping to keep all of the new Canadians in the province.
“So what we want to do is essentially match newcomers with available positions within our community and essentially do matching in between the two so that they can better integrate into the community,” said Reddy.
Reddy says more than 700 newcomers to Canada settle in Moncton every year, but only 63 percent of them actually stay in the province. She’d like to see that number increase to 80%.
Justin Ryan from The Multicultural Association of Greater Moncton says the job fair is meant to bridge a gap between immigrants and potential employers, with the hope of keeping the immigrants here.
‘If you are a recruiter and you pick up a resume and you are like ‘I can’t even pronounce their name how am I going to do an interview,’ that’s a very unnerving thing,” said Ryan.
“It’s a challenge for me because of the different cultures between the western and Asian culture,” said Bui.
More than 200 jobs were up for grabs at 15 of Moncton’s largest call centres. The jobs are open to anyone, not just immigrants. But Robert Campbell from Contact NB, which represents the call centre industry in New Brunswick, says retaining more new Canadians is critical to the province’s growth.
“We are not call centres anymore we are contact centres and we service the world, so essentially we need more bilingual people and we need more multi-languages,” Campbell said.
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