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Making Words Count at The Working Centre

By Christa Van Daele

Published in September 2003

Elena’s eyes light up with delight. After a five concentrated ninety minute sessions with a counsellor at The Working Centre at 43 Queen, the final copy of her resume that has been collaboratively sweated over for the past month is finally printed – a well earned destination. Both employment counsellor and career changer have scrutinized the resume carefully, not just once or twice, but many times indeed. And what a resume it is. Elegant yet down-to-earth, Elena’s carefully crafted resume is intended to carry her forward into a professional career development path beyond the “survival job” level that she has been working at for several years in this community.

Elena is from Puerto Rico. In Canada, She has worked as cleaner,  but her professional experience and training actually qualifies her to be an office administrator, or an executive secretary. Now, she likes the new, clean words she sees on the page, words which accurately capture her past and her present, her values and her ambitions, in unapologetically assertive terms. Polished translations of transferable skills and pride experiences have been accomplished, translations aimed to reassure potential local employers that she has worked in environments and roles that are highly familiar to them, if only they would give her a chance.  So, as she scrutinizes the arrangement of words and expressions on her new Canadian resume, the flash of delight on her face is about seeing her proven accomplishments, her motivated skills, captured in a strategic new way – a way that gives her a fighting chance away from the life of casual and temp jobs that have characterized life in Canada thus far.  

Making words count, in many diverse ways, is a joint project of meaning making. As such, warm relationships created around resume collaborations are core projects in the life of The Working Centre, carried out every day at meeting tables, or near computer terminals. Any employment counsellor can tell you that a well wordsmithed resume brings pleasure and great satisfaction to both contributors while validating a special identity for one. As Elena builds confidence to tackle the future, a substantive new biography may well help her turn an important new corner in her life.  

Yet, a well considered career development path that leads to professional employment in a New Canadian’s life takes time. Rather than one tidy resume or one  good job lead, it takes many  heads,  hearts, and  continually renewed cycles of  proposal-writing for  provincial and federal government program funds to build  lasting “good work”  foundations for  the New Canadians who come daily to The Working Centre. In Elena’s case, the assistance of a job developer from the region of Waterloo, dedicated computer instructors at The Working Centre, and a resume developer prepared to explore Elena’s  professional life history in some depth have all contributed to her growing confidence about marketing her skills seriously next time around. It helps that her children are a little bit bigger, than her family’s settlement process is more complete, that she has a supportive church community. This way, Elena can attend more fully to  a task as frustratingly unknown to her as the functional-style North American resume. “Our resumes were not at all like this, you see’, she states. “In Puerto Rico, we wrote pages and pages, and we just wrote down every job we had every had, and what our employers had to say about us, with long letters from them attached. Here, it is so different.”  

In addition to reviewing her career prospects with a career coach, and upgrading Word and Excel proficiencies twice a week in the Customer Service Specialist Program at The Working Centre,  Elena  is a passionate contributor to her own family and to her  church community. She works more than an exhausting double day. Ambitiously enrolled for the past several years  in a range of  advanced writing courses at Conestoga College, she has also attained her grade 12 at St Louis recently, despite possessing this important credential and additional post-secondary training from Puerto Rico.  “It’s a lot of work,”  she explains. All of it is necessary, she has learned, to career advancement in this country.  “I know I must do this,” she adds. “My  written as well as my spoken  English must be close to  perfect, I know.”  Elena’s outgoing strong nature, her bilingual Spanish-English fluencies, and her ready willingness to take on quickly paced office management roles make her an outstanding choice for any employer. “I like to work with people from all walks of life,” she says. “And, I like to be really busy. I do not like to be bored.”

Many friends and supporters of The Working Centre are certainly aware of the hard-working and well-qualified New Canadians everywhere in our midst in Kitchener-Waterloo. The Toronto Star, the Globe and mail, and  the K-W Record have all publicized stories within the past several years to  help build  public awareness of those  whose advanced skills and training  skills are critically overlooked in our economy. Yet, few may be in touch with the hard  everyday  realities of career advancement, the persistent string of disappointments that individuals such as Elena must continually ignore in order to keep pushing forward into decent-paying, improved job prospects.  

Elena works fourteen hour days to get it all done, on top of her domestic chores and her  extensive volunteer work. For instance,  in order to “build” a new resume, treating words like well-made bricks that can be moved around as necessary, she must work industriously after her computer classes on resume development tasks assigned by her coach, complex tasks by no means easy to complete. As well, she must be willing and able to  experiment continually with sophisticated English language tools to catalogue correctly the new skills she acquiring in her work placement that the Region of Waterloo has set up on her behalf.

As Elena and dozens of others entering Canada have articulated their own progress at The Working Centre, she has been willing to make words count to accurately capture her new reality. Language effort and the building of a new life  have proceeded hand in hand. She has been willing to harmonize old and new ways of looking at things, to assess the terms of her present life  pragmatically, while retaining the special meanings and promises of the old. New words, new expressions, and  collaborative acts of meaning – making in a safe environment are integral to this process, a process not without risk. As an act of faith and hope, Elena is willing to dream. She will be looking to the community to receive her best efforts, as she moves away from survivor work to her hoped-for destination.

Good Work News is The Working Centre’s quarterly newspaper that reports on our latest community building efforts and seeks out ideas which redefine work, consumerism, and sustainable living. First published in 1984, we have now published over 150 issues with a circulation of 13,000.

Subscribe to Good Work News with a donation of any amount to The Working Centre.

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The Integrated Circle of Care is a fluid and collaborative approach followed by workers from different agencies weaving through St. John’s Kitchen. Within this approach, staff members from each agency are aware of their specific personal roles. However, the high level of collaboration between workers means that people can approach any worker, without knowing their agency association or specific role, and still receive support – either that worker will support the person directly, or they will introduce the person to another worker who can support the person more appropriately.

This approach makes relationships more natural and support more accessible. Workers from different agencies are easily approachable, meaning that people build relationships with multiple workers. Having relationships with different workers is important to a person’s support – it makes support from a trusted source easy to find, and means that people have a choice of worker to approach in any given situation.

In order to maintain a circle of care around a person, workers from different agencies ask for consent from the person for information to be shared between workers. Continuous communication between workers helps to ensure that people do not fall into gaps between services, and also that services are not duplicated.