A Bridge to Where? An Analysis of the Effectiveness of the Bridging Programs for Internationally Trained Professionals in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The biggest hurdle for new immigrants in Canada is their integration into the economic system. These immigrants have higher levels of education but their earnings have been lower and falling in comparison to the native-born Canadians (Akter et al., 2013; Block and Galabuzzi, 2011; Reitz, 2011). The issue of integrating Internationally Educated Professionals (IEPs) into the labour market in Canada is complex and multifaceted. In its effort to ease this gap of integration, the provincial government has invested millions of dollars to establish numerous â bridging programsâ in Ontario. These bridging programs that are supposed to integrate IEPs quickly into the labour market vary depending on the profession, service providers, their length and structure. Utilizing qualitative research and an interpretivist lens, with the help of IEPs (n=20) who have completed the bridging programs and service providers (n=8) for primary data, it has become apparent that although these programs were of benefit to some participants, they do not live up to expectations for many IEPs who continue to struggle to get employed in their profession. This thesis identifies neoliberalism, as not only an economic and political force but also a potent ideology that fosters self-blame.The bridging programs are short-term courses of varying lengths that are supposed to help IEPs address and overcome the challenges of economic integration. They may help in certain ways but are neither equipped to address, nor capable of addressing, the systemic issues of discrimination or racism, with issues of inconsistencies, instability and short sidedness surrounding them. An overall change in attitude to embrace social responsibility and renewed commitment to social justice is required by all stakeholders, if we are to address the ongoing plight of the so many IEPs who are qualified and skilled, but cannot practice in their professions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".