Hi cmqa80. Welcome to the forum. I'm glad there is another surviving 1122 from Manila on this thread. I was mostly on my own. It's a good thing the 1122s of India, China, Latin America, and the rest of the world have embraced me as if I was one of their own. ;D
I work for a business and technology consulting firm. Most of my assigned client-projects are outside the country, but since July of this year I have shifted and limited my attention to a few domestic accounts (those mainly in Makati, very near the Canadian Embassy) so I can give time for FSW application-related activities.
At the start, I was not too worried about getting a job in Canada. My current employer initially committed a role for me in our Canada office. However, they did not expect the visa-acquisition process to take more than 6 months. Now, almost 6 months into the process, the company has grown impatient and decided to hire somebody else for what would have been my Toronto role. I now have to seriously find a replacement job. The outlook scares me:
1) Canada's unemployment rate rose from 7.2% to 7.4% in the last 2 months. All projections for 2012 point to an unemployment rate of 8% in 2012. That means there will be around 1.5 million people who will be out looking for jobs at any given time, on average.
2) Recent research shows that there is a higher unemployment rate among immigrants than natural-born Canadians.
3) The average annual pay of immigrants who came to Canada in the last 5 years have been steadily going down, is now about 30% lower than their Canadian-born counterparts. We already know that very little credit is given to education and work experience obtained outside of Canada. It seems as if it will only get worse as Canada enters a period of prolonged economic uncertainty.
4) I learned from a Canadian newspaper item today that the average annual pay of immigrants is surprisingly low. Personally, it is as if I am going to Canada to get a 50% pay cut. Scary indeed.
5) Unlike health professionals, our career paths and bridging programs as business professionals are not as clear cut. It is as if we have to start from zero all over again.
I am not being an alarmist. Just sharing my own thoughts and fears with friends in the forum. After all have been said, I remain optimistic. I will surely work my a*s off to make sure I don't miss out on any opportunity to make something BIG out of my impending transfer. As I have said before, I am ready to take on survival jobs for two years until I get fully integrated into my chosen industry.
Good luck to all of us. And I hope we can all help each other out once we hit the ground running in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary or whatever Canadian city or town we end up in.
