Engaging: How a Career Edge Internship Helped an Internationally Trained Lawyer Find His Footing and His Career
“I arrived from England with a law degree. The position we were able to find was as a probation officer, something close to legal services, law enforcement. And from there, I was able to finish my education in law. Now I’m a practicing lawyer.”
That through-line sounds clean in retrospect. At the time, it was anything but.
Dimitry arrived in Canada around 2009 or 2010 as an internationally trained professional, a law degree in hand, and an invisible wall between him and the career he’d built his credentials for. He describes the 
internship in one word: engaging.
“You’re put into a professional setting, so you have to engage with the atmosphere you’re in. You have to understand the policies and the procedures. A proper place has its own training. You really have to be engaged with the position to establish yourself.”
He didn’t treat it as temporary. That was the difference.
“I went to training. I engaged with networking. I started volunteering. I tried to understand the nature of the work, and then I was able to find further employment in the same field, in the same type of position, in a different office.”
That contract at the Ministry lasted nearly four years. But the internship gave him something beyond employment, it gave him a way in that would have otherwise taken years to find on his own.
“Unless you know how a probation officer role works, you would never be able to figure out how to apply successfully, how to be part of it. In this case, it was done for me, because Career Edge does the pre-screening, narrows down what’s within your scope, and then you target specifics. For me to find the same opportunity myself would have been way more difficult.”
The most valuable skill he walked away with was networking, but not in the transactional sense.
“You meet people, you talk to them. You see people in training, you try to understand what’s going on so you can become part of the environment. That’s how you move forward.”
If he could go back, his advice to himself would be to go further, faster.
“Take advantage of it. Maybe there is more to it than just the role you’re placed in. The probation officer position opened doors to internal postings in the Government of Ontario, policy jobs, different types of work that aren’t really open to the public. Be even more active.”
What Career Edge got right, in his view, is something most programs miss entirely: matching people to roles that actually fit, rather than filling positions for the sake of it.
“It’s not about giving someone a job to fill for half a year and leave, that’s a waste of everybody’s time. It’s about information. Arming a person with information so they can move forward. Give them a full understanding of what’s expected and let them measure it against themselves. They shouldn’t fill positions just because they have to.”
That internship didn’t just give Dimitry work experience. It ran parallel to his law school years, and made finishing possible.
“I finished law school with minimal debt because I was working. And I was able to find my first job in law because the probation officer role was adjacent to criminal law. It was a direct, indirect relation. It was extremely useful. I would do it again and recommend it to anybody.”
For Career Edge, on 30 years of connecting people to careers that actually fit:
“Big thank you. It was the only truly useful agency I worked with. I found many survival jobs through other agencies, but Career Edge had a professional approach. Whoever is connecting all the dots and figuring out the process on your end, they should receive a big credit for that.”
Want to learn more about Dimitry and his journey, watch the full video here