As a newcomer, you chose Canada for a fresh start for your family, but that fresh start comes with challenges. You may be feeling isolated, disconnected from your new community, bored and perhaps even stuck with no computer literacy or English conversation skills. Settling in Canada is not always easy, and newcomers need support along the way and Canada knows this. It has funded community programs in many local agencies, such as here at the Centre for Skills Development in Halton.

As a new immigrant to Canada around 10 years ago, I still remember my family’s very first winter. A lot of newcomers have this memory! For those of us who arrived in Canada in the winter, our first memory was stepping outside of the airport into the frigid air of reality! Could life on earth actually survive this cold, we wondered. If we arrived in summer, our cold wintery stereo-type of Canada got blown away by the unexpected heat, leaving us thinking that winter couldn’t be that bad with summers this hot! That was us: we arrived in June, it was so beautiful and hot! It made us feel like winters weren’t going to be so bad...we were, of course, so wrong!  

The pandemic has changed the world of work and has influenced almost all industries in some way or another. Time is of the essence when recruiting and in a competitive marketplace it’s important for companies to make their hiring practices more efficient. ATS allows employers to review more applications without having to go through them manually. They utilize a software known as an “Applicant Tracking System “(ATS) that simplifies and expedites the recruiting process. It also manages ads on multiple job sites and records a database of new clients.