My Name is Muhammad Imran Hussain Khan. I am IT professional with 10+ years’ experience of managing IT infrastructure and Operations in Pakistan. I arrived in Canada with my wife in May 2017 and moved to Regina. Currently, I am working as Senior Technical Analyst IT Security … Read more
It’s an immense pleasure to share my experience with the course on Soft Skills: Professional Communication. This course has offered me a deep insight into the Canadian workplace culture. Although all the participants come from different cultural and professional backgrounds but the overall structure, content and organization of the course is such that it is easy to understand and correlate for one and all.
Would you recommend SOPA? If so, why? I would absolutely recommend SOPA to my colleagues and friends. I am pretty sure that everyone who attends the SOPA program will learn a lot and they will really find the answers to most, if not all, of their questions and concerns. Attending the SOPA program is a definite learning experience.
My name is Hao Wang. I have been an IT project manager and consultant for seven years and hold two masters degrees in Finance and Economics. Before landing in Winnipeg in March 2017, I was a client of SOPA (Settlement Online Pre-Arrival). After 6 months of arriving in Winnipeg, I successfully landed a job in my field.
Before arriving, Mussarat and her husband Javed found the SOPA program online. They felt that it would help them enhance their job search preparations. They both took several classes, but found Job Search Strategies to be the most beneficial. Job Search Strategies course showed them the Canadian styles of resumes, and enhanced their knowledge of interview tactics.
The best thing about SOPA is that it offers its courses before arrival. It is, indeed, a great opportunity that newcomers can arrive prepared. It helps smooth their settlement, and fasten their job search by having Canadian resume and other job search tools ready in hand. So they will get no surprises once they arrive and can integrate earlier to the economy and to the area they settle in.
We always look for ways to support newcomers to Canada, so we teamed up with the SOPA (Settlement Online Pre-arrival) program to deliver complementary pre-arrival services. SOPA program provides free tools, resources and courses. It helps immigrants develop skills for the job search in Canada and improve communication skills for the Canadian workplace. The teamwork between BCCA-IN and SOPA proved to be successful. Success, first and foremost, for the clients.
Murshed Nizam is one of our former SOPA Clients. Before landing in Ontario in December, 2016 Murshed participated in SOPA program. His career in Canada took off soon after his arrival and ever since has been progressing. Today, Murshed is working for a group of companies managing several hotels in Canada and the USA. Almost a year after going through SOPA program, Murshed is sharing his story of his path to a dream job.
When my Intake Counselor, Milagros Dacwag with the SOPA Manitoba team, introduced me to SOPA’s Job Search Strategies course, I thought to myself that the job search is technically not new to me. I had created resumes before and successfully landed jobs for the past 13 years or so. How different can the job search in Canada be?
I think that the Canadian Workplace Integration course is one of the best courses offered by SOPA. This is because the course focuses on closing the gap between what new immigrants know and expect from a workplace in Canada, to how employers and colleagues actually view the newcomers. As newcomers we usually think that we should improve our technical and hard skills, rather than soft skills, in order to get a job and to progress in a certain career. Because this is how things worked for us in our home countries.