An existential perspective on the role of human agency in the retraining of immigrant skilled workers in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative study explored the career re-development of immigrant professionals in Canada by centering the investigation on their Canadian retraining journey. The goal of this study was to provide a deeper understanding of the transition issues, retraining decision-making process, retraining experiences and outcomes, and coping strategies of the immigrant professionals to uncover the role of human agency in dealing with the existential givens of their Canadian career re-development. Twenty participants, 11 females and 9 males between the ages of 30 and 50, were interviewed for this study. The participants held at least a bachelor’s degree and had at least 3 years of work experience prior to their migration. They received Canadian retraining and had at least 1 year of post-retraining Canadian work experience. Semi-structured interviews were completed and the interview transcripts were analyzed using grounded theory qualitative analysis approach. Similar to previous research findings, the immigrant professionals in this study had intact career identities and meaning prior to their migration. Many participants were confident about transitioning into their original professional field in Canada with some participants having expected to pursue Canadian retraining. The participants, however, experienced systemic career transition barriers in Canada, such as language and acculturation barriers, discrimination, isolation, and non-recognition of their foreign credentials and work experience by Canadian employers. They completed Canadian retraining to cope with these barriers and pursue their career goals. Almost all of the participants shared that their retraining facilitated their career re-development and many were either undergoing or planned on pursuing additional retraining to improve their future career prospects. Throughout their career re-development process, focusing on their long-term career goals (which provided them with meaning), acceptance and openness, and social supports provided them the perseverance to utilize their human agency. The participants accessed their human agency to revise their meaning-making, create a plan of action, and take action with the intention of pursuing their long-term goals. This career re-development process is summarized in the model proposed by this study, the Existential and Human Agency Model of Career Re-development. The implications of the findings of this study for policy, professional resources, and immigrant professionals are discussed. Suggestions for future research directions are provided.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".