What it takes for a Newcomer to be successful in Canada

The Government of Canada last week announced that it will be giving permanent residency to 90,000 people which will include health care professionals, essential workers and most importantly the international student community, who meets the criteria.

Although majority of these people that will be getting the Permanent Residency, are already in Canada, however, the feeling of becoming a Permanent Resident gives you a new hope.  You start looking at your life in Canada in a totally different way.  The uncertainty that you had regarding your status in Canada is now over. As your status get confirmed, you now start calling Canada as your new home and you start looking at life differently.  You start making long terms plans of establishing yourself in Canada. 

As a newcomer to Canada, and having gone through a lots of ups & down before finally settling down very recently, I will share five (5) strategies that have worked for me.

1. Create Your Own Path – Be Different than others.  Don’t follow the crowd.  When I landed in Canada and decided to enter in the HR field, I was told that in Canada, HR is mostly dominated by females.  However, I was not looking for a job in HR, I was going to build a career in HR, which is different than finding a job.  So, I decided to get into the field.  And in order to be successful in the HR field, I chose different strategies like volunteering in my professional association, building a network of core group of senior HR professionals to name a few.  These strategies helped me in building a successful HR career for me over a longer period of time.

2. Be True to Who You Are:  As much as I was spending time on building my professional career, as a newcomer to Canada, I realized the challenges the newcomer community face in their early settlement in Canada.  So my heart went out to all the newcomers and I spent a lot of time mentoring them, coaching them.  I have been doing it for last 16 years consistently. Even more now by building “Brilliant Minds Group” to support the newcomer community.

3. Want it Bad Enough – There will be times in your life, when life will throw challenges at you.  Life has thrown challenges at me many times.  My personal belief always have been “Winners Never Quit” and “Quitters Never Win”.  Every time life threw challenge at me either on a personal level or professional level, I became more passionate about getting what I wanted to achieve.  At one point of time, I travelled all of Ontario over a period of 1 year time to find my next opportunity.

4. Be Creative – Creativity has no limit and does not need formal education.  Many times you have to become creative to achieve what you want.  In other words, sometime you may have to give first before you can receive.

5. Have Fun: We all deserve to have Fun. In these challenging times, we all have to find different ways to have fun.  The other day, I decided not to touch the technology for an entire day.  Took my son with me and went out, all day we did was full masti by doing window shopping in a shopping mall, eating out forgot all the tasks that I have on my plate.  “Thodi Masti to Banti Hai”

Trust me, these strategies have worked for me.  If these have worked for me, I am sure these will work for you.