Read Purvi’s story of being an immigrant to Canada and how she found her job through Career Edge!
Purvi Patel
C# Programmer Analyst, IT
I immigrated to Canada in June 2016. Since I did not have a Canadian education or work experience, I struggled a lot to start my career in Canada. The first job I got was as a data entry clerk, which was only to fulfill financial needs, so I decided to go back to school the next year, in 2017, where I attended the .Net Developer Bridging Program at Humber College. After graduating in 2018, I started job searching in my field of education; I created and submitted so many applications for employment agencies and roles, but unfortunately, I never got any affirmative responses.
Fortunately for me though, my Employment Advisor from Humber College recommended that I register with Career Edge, which I did promptly.
Honestly, I had only applied for 3 opportunities through Career Edge, when I was hired for one of them. It was at Career Edge itself that gave me the opportunity. In April 2018, I was hired by Career Edge as a Programmer Analyst and I was so excited to join my first dream job in Canada! Since then, I have been enjoying working with Career Edge and the team here where the most important thing I learned is:
“Take risks in your life. If you win, you can lead. If you lose, you can guide.”
For me, the Career Edge Team is like my family. Through this organization, I have met so many talented and fabulous individuals. I find it so special that we celebrate different cultural festivals and holidays together, where I got to know more about the people I work with, their backgrounds, and the places they are from. Everyone in the team is also very supportive of each other, in good time and bad time. I still remember my first day on the job. I was so nervous and worried about how I would manage with the new workplace and work culture, since it was my first real IT job in Canada, but everybody was so nice and supportive. In fact, my team members were the first people I became friends with after moving to Canada!
The job I do is what makes Career Edge so important to me, too. Through my role as an IT professional and programmer, I help support our candidates, employer partners, and staff with technical difficulties, while also maintaining and improving all the technological aspects of our website and database. Through the work that I do every day, I am supporting individuals who, like myself back in 2016, are struggling to get their lives started in Canada, and helping them connect with encouraging employers and mentors. I love my job and how at the end of every day, I feel very happy to help not only my team, but also individuals who are skilled newcomers, people with disabilities, and recent graduates to build their careers in Canada.
While working with Career Edge, I have the opportunity to work in different IT areas like infrastructure, project development, planning, testing, and deployment. Since the organization is very collaborative, I also get the chance to interact with other departments, which really helped me develop new interpersonal skills. I am always trying my best to provide satisfactory resolutions for the challenges of our candidates, partners, and staff, because I know for every solution I create, I might help one more person get closer to launching their career. Every project I have worked on offered the people I interact with and support more convenience and clarity. And that is what motivates me to do what I do and why I think it’s so important. Every day at work I am trying to help as much as I can to make everyone happy and help launch careers – just as the previous IT programmer and other Career Edge staff were helping me launch my career back in 2018. In short, I believe that…
“In the joy of others lies our own”.
Let’s continue to change individuals’ lives, together……
Over the coming months, hear stories right from our very own staff about why Career Edge and the work that they do is so important to them.