Navigating transition to work: Recent immigrants’ experiences of lifelong learning in Canada

One of the top priorities of immigrants upon their arrival in their host country is access to the labour market. However, many find themselves facing intersecting obstacles as they struggle to secure a job. Based on interviews with 18 immigrant settlement workers (16 female, 2 male) who themselves migrated to Canada from 10 different countries, this article investigates how these immigrants navigated the complex path of transition to work. Adopting intersectionality as its theoretical framework and institutional ethnography as its methodology, the qualitative study presented here focused on how race, gender and class intersect in shaping immigrants’ experiences of transition to work as a lifelong learning process. The findings reveal that newly arrived immigrants encounter multifaceted structural barriers in their struggle to secure a foothold in the Canadian labour market. These barriers include delays or even refusal in accepting immigrants’ prior qualifications, and they are shaped by the intersections of race, gender and class. The study also reveals how immigrants’ experiences of employability-oriented lifelong learning unveil institutional complexes and reflect colonising practices among governmental organisations, qualifications assessment agencies, employment institutions and immigrant service agencies. Instead, a decolonising and inclusive strategy is proposed to provide lifelong learning opportunities for all, acknowledge and affirm cultural difference and diversity as desirable assets, and challenge the current ideological moorings of lifelong learning theories, policies and practices in the age of transnational migration.