Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
MESSAGE: BOARD OF DIRECTORS: CAPE ENTERS NEW PHASE
Having celebrated its twentieth Anniversary in 2013, CAPE Council for Access to the Profession of Engineering entered a new phase in its history in January 2014. This new direction derives from two considerations:
1. CAPE developed and initiated a multi-stakeholder employment strategy for immigrants with engineering backgrounds to address persistent high unemployment and under-employment amongst its members drawn from immigrants with engineering backgrounds. This was entitled ‘From Canadian First’ to ‘Canada First’ and released in May 2006. As shown in the chart below, the percentage of members joining CAPE and practicing professionally in 2004 has more than doubled by 2014 while the unemployed/marginally employed portion of our membership has dropped to its lowest level since 2004. Further those not working in the professional setting but who hold jobs in
ANNUAL REPORT 2013/2014
NEW FRONTIERS
other fields had also been increasing in the last three years. This definitive trend indicates that CAPE’s efforts and employment supports for its members over the last ten years are reaping fruitful results.
Past Board Members of CAPE
2. CAPE has persistently has persistently faced issues in maintaining financial sustainability over the last ten years. Consequently it has had to seek continuous project funding through its ground-breaking action research initiatives. To support these initiatives and maintain employment support for its members, CAPE has also developed a full suite of online career development tools and fee-for-service programs for Service Providing Organizations (SPOs) serving immigrants with engineering and other professional backgrounds. CAPE has become a partner of choice for many of these organizations. Depite these efforts financial sustainability has remained an issue for CAPE.
These two developments have been main reason for CAPE to become a fully virtualized Organization in 2014.
3. While CAPE has So in 2003, CAPE initiated a new systematic community action research approach to helping its members. This started with the Engineering Access Project, funded by Canadian Heritage and Human Resources Skills Development Canada. CAPE set up an extensive database of skills and competencies of its members compared these with the homegrown pool of engineers, documented employer perspectives and the nature of access issues faced by immigrants with engineering backgrounds coming to Canada. This project concluded that its members had been locked out of practicing their profession due to the saturated professional practice market in Canada, restrictive regulatory practices, and risk-adverse employers. Through six multi-stakeholder consultative roundtables Deriving from this CAPE moved from access issues to employment support, advocating systemic change and leveraging skilled immigrant competencies through skills-gaps and employer-driven training. Since 2006 CAPE has trained over 100 job developers and employment counselors; incorporated CAPE employment supports and strengthened training in 80 service providing organizations across Ontario; and engaged with all levels of Government, 142 employers, 5 Universities, 9 community and private colleges, 2 regulators, 2 professional associations, and 25 community partners through consultative roundtables.
Our efforts are finally showing results as seen on the right.
REPORT: NEW FRONTIERSDr. Razaq Ijaduola
CAPE was incorporated in 2006 with a vision to help immigrants with engineering backgrounds to achieve their maximum potential through full participation in the practice of engineering in Canada; contributing to their local communities, province, country and the world at large; and maximizing the utilization of their engineering knowledge. However, as our institutional knowledge improved CAPE began to emerge as a leader in the field of managing change to improve Canada’s competitive edge and innovation through its highly-skilled immigrant professionals.
Over the past two years, this vision has sharpened and evolved. This derives from the global nature and high level of skills ( an average of over 12 years of experience and over 30% of CAPE members holding postgraduate qualifications – Masters or higher). Recognising that the professional workplace is rapidly evolving to become diverse, virtualized, multi-professional and multi-disciplinary, technology-driven and knowledge–based CAPE is transiting to become the Council for Advancement of Professions (CAP) to lead change. In keeping with this vision CAPE has accomplished the following in the last twelve months:
Strengthened its services for the engineering sector to include comprehensive on-line employment and career advancement , innovative training, networking and mentoring supports
Implemented our first major multi-profession initiative - the IEHP pilot Navigator project for selected health professions comprising physician assistants, audiologists and speech language pathologists, medical technologists and dietitians
Continued development of gaps-driven on-line training workshops targeting engineering, environmental and ICT professions
The IEHP Navigator Project for selected health professions is an Ontario Works Project funded by the Ontario Government through the Ministry of Training Colleges and Universities aims to improve the quality of employment preparation and skills development programs for health professionals (focusing on the foreign trained entrants).
Early findings from this project are revealing that the emerging education model for the selected health professions in Ontario resembles the one for the engineering profession and comprises:
Foundational knowledge and grounding in an academic setting
An internship/clinical practice training component to fully ground theoretical knowledge gained in the classroom into entry-to-practice competencies leading to professional licensure/certification
Life-long experiential and peer-to-peer learning to develop competencies to keep up with the rapidly changing workplaces, technology, applications and knowledge, leadership, inter-professional, evidence-based and collaborative practices
To accommodate these findings CAPE secured funding and extension of the IEHP Navigator project for selected health project which will now end on March 31, 2014
FROM CAPE TO CAP
Since 2006, CAPE has engaged its members in annual knowledge events aimed at expanding the understanding of the nature of the engineering profession and its relation to global engineering skills. In this vein, CAPE has hosted annual knowledge events on topics such as Transferability for Transformation-Mobilizing Global Engineering Experience (2007); Self-Regulation, Governance, Public Administration and the Profession of
Engineering (2008); From Regulation to Innovation (2009). Innovative Solutions: Foreign Credential Recognition (2010), Nano to Mega: Engineering (2011) and Transition and Transformation (2012) all seeking to discuss issues related to technological convergence, innovation and new frontiers in engineering. Through these events CAPE has increasing recognized the need to evolve, transform and position itself to accommodate these changes.
Half a millennium ago renaissance artist-engineers like Leonardo da Vinci, Filippo Brunelleschi, and Benvenuto Cellini were masters of several professions and fields simultaneously. In contrast the last hundred years have led to specialization that has splintered professions into hundreds of disciplines and sub-disciplines. Today no one can master more than a tiny fragment of knowledge. Paradoxically the convergence of sciences and technology are once again calling for a renaissance; one that embodies a holistic view of technology based on transformative tools, collaborative engagement between professions and across disciplines and a unified understanding of the physical world from the nano-scale to the planetary scale.
In positioning itself at the center of this call for transformation; CAPE is undergoing a transition to the Council for Advancement of Professions. In the coming year CAPE will focus to completing all its current projects, initiating detailed consultations with its members, restructuring and strengthening organizational structure and culture through extensive strategic planning and formalizing the transition to CAP.
NETWORKING, MENTORING AND KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE
Globalization and internationalization of professions - education and practice - are now hot topics. Engineering and other professionals face volatile markets, complex demands for skills and knowledge, and problematic circumstances and expectations in ethics and governance. The challenge is how these professionals with their diverse languages, beliefs, educational and technical, workplace, academic and corporate cultures can keep pace with
rapid change and new expectations.
Newer technology including; Facebook, mobile computing and collaborative communications that cuts across professional and cultural boundaries is used extensively by newer generations to address these challenges. The older generations unfamiliar with this technology are forced to adapt to stay up to date and relevant. The need for multiple background and learning styles in conjunction with job complexity, means that organizations are no longer sufficiently served by formal training. Today the learning experience incorporates individual, formal, experiential and collaborative elements. Consequently, learning from experience has become crucial for personal and professional growth. Mentoring and networking are powerful forms of informal learning via experiential exchange.
Our online Multi-Profession Mentoring (MPM) platform that we will be releasing shortly is based on cross-connections for knowledge-sharing between professionals practicing in the engineering and healthcare fields. It provides collaborative learning opportunities through mentoring connections that focus on:
Personal and professional growth
Network building
Experiential learning
Knowledge exchange
Career development and skills exchanges
IEHP NAVIGATOR PROJECT FOR SELECTED HEALTH PROFESSIONS
Between October 2008 and October 2010, CAPE undertook the leveraging global engineering skills Project funded by the Ministry of Training Colleges and Universities through its Labour Market Partnerships Division. This resulted in an employer driven curricula development process to derive employment preparation training for immigrants with engineering backgrounds (IEBs).
The IEHP (Internationally educated Health Professionals) pilot Navigator Project seeks to improve the quality of employment preparation and skills development programs for immigrants from selected health professions using the CAPE employer-driven curricula development process. Under this pilot Project CAPE is piloting its talent integration process in Ontario for following selected health professions:
Audiology and Speech language pathology
Medical Technologists
Dietitians
Physician Assistants
This project is an Ontario Works Project funded by the Ontario Government through the Ministry of Training Colleges and in-kind/cash contributions from CAPE.
This pilot did not include the functionality to capture and compare the foundational (graduate) competencies gained through academic training and their comparison to the content of an academic programs geared to professional practice. The project has now been extended to add this functionality to create a seamless process through which a user can self-assess their gaps throughout the full continuum of the life-long learning model comprising graduate, entry-to-practice based training and advanced self-directed learning competencies.
The project will support the strengthening of Ontario’s integrated HHR system deriving from the fact that:
CAPE’s evidence-based process will strengthen integration of IEHPs into these professions
This process will identify actual competency ‘gaps’ to strengthen training and employment preparation for IEHPs in these regulated health occupations;
The real-time technology incorporated in this process provides critical labour market intelligence and data to enable organizations to prioritize IEHP workforce planning
DRAFT FINANCIAL STATEMENTS PAGE 1 OF 3
DRAFT FINANCIAL STATEMENTS PAGE 2 OF 3
DRAFT FINANCIAL STATEMENTS PAGE 3 OF 3
LIFE- LONG LEARNING MODEL
Deriving from extensive community action research over the last ten years, CAPE initiated several Ontario-wide projects under its Leveraging Global Engineering Competencies Project. These included the Leveraging Global Engineering Skills (LGES)1 an Employment Ontario funded project under the Ontario Labour Market Partnerships (OLMP) funded by the Ministry of Training Colleges and Universities through its Employment and Training Division, and in-kind contributions from CAPE.
The primary objective of LGES was to validate an employer-driven, job-function based curriculum development process for internationally trained/experienced engineers, technicians and technologists seeking to join the engineering profession in Ontario by linking these directly to employer needs. The competency matching technology adapted for the LGES Project included a real-time skills-capturing interface (Portfolio Builder) and database and a job requirements capturing interface (Job Articulator) and database. The interfaces were linked to the databases to analyze the two sets of data in real-time through a third interface (Gaps Abstractor). This ‘gaps’ analysis was used to develop and strengthen the content of
1 Gurmeet Bambrah (2010) Summary Report, Leveraging Global Engineering Skills Project, ©2010 CAPE Council for Access to the Profession of Engineering, http://www.capeinfo.ca/docs/LGES.pdf
curricula for piloting employer-driven job-function based training for engineering and selected health professions
A significant finding of this work has been the modelling of an emerging life-long learning model for education in the professions. This comprises three distinct components:
Intense in-classroom education to attain foundational knowledge and grounding in the basis of science, principles of professional practice and analytical capabilities
A ‘co-op’ or work placement, internship or training practice-based component to fully ground theoretical knowledge gained in the classroom into entry-to-practice leading to professional licensure/certification
Life-long experiential and peer-to-peer learning to keep up with the rapidly changing workplace, society, technology, applications and knowledge.
In the coming years our work in advancing professions will focus on this life-long learning model.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS 2012-2014
CAPE is pleased to invite new members to join its Board of Directors which includes:
1. Michael Dang PhD P.Eng2. Muralidhar Maheshwara 3. Tahira Qamar 4. Rasheed Aktar5. Bharti Desai6. Darshak Vaishnav7. Baber Khan 8. Dr. A.Y Lakhani
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
IEHP Navigator Project –Employment Ontario project partly funded by the Ontario Government through the Employment and training Division of the Ministry of Training Colleges and Universities
STRATEGIC PARTNERS
YWCA Hamilton – Bridging programs for Engineering, environmental and information/Communication Technology
AGM SPONSORS
Amarina KalraSun Life Financial Advisor
Vikas RamrakhaRai Grant Insuarance Brokers
Inder SinghRemax Realtor
