From Newcomers to Game-Changers
Improving Immigrant Skill Utilization in Key Sectors
Français • June 9, 2025
Wasted and mismatched skills
Immigrants come to Canada with an abundance of skills and credentials, hoping to build better lives for themselves and their families. Yet many find themselves in jobs that do not reflect their full potential.
The Conference Board of Canada, on behalf of the Future Skills Centre, is researching immigrant skill mismatch (the underuse of immigrants’ skills in roles they are qualified for) and skill wastage (unemployment or employment outside their field of expertise) in three sectors with acute labour shortages and high availability of immigrant labour: health, construction, and accommodation and food services.
In this project, we will do the following:
- Develop a scorecard illustrating which cities in Canada are underutilizing immigrant skills in the health, construction, and accommodation and food services’ sectors.
- Investigate barriers to improving immigrant skill utilization in these critical sectors.
- Outline opportunities for cities, employers, and settlement service providers to better align immigrant talent with workforce needs.
Why immigrant skills matter
Immigrants bring skills that are vital for meeting current and future labour market demands. Leveraging these skills more effectively can help strengthen critical sectors of the economy while creating more meaningful employment opportunities for immigrants.
Lower earnings and limited career satisfaction hinder the personal and professional growth of immigrants, limiting their ability to fully contribute to and thrive in their communities. Ultimately, immigrants whose potential goes unrecognized may not have enough incentive to stay in Canada.
Persistent challenges
Immigrants can help reshape Canada’s future, but several key challenges remain:
- An overly complicated path to getting skills recognized: Immigrants with skills in knowledge-based sectors such as the healthcare industry face obstacles in having their schooling and work experience recognized in Canada. There is an acute labour shortage for health professionals in Canada, yet immigrants with experience that could help alleviate this pressure are struggling to get jobs in healthcare. Provincial regulators such as the College of Registered Nurses of Alberta (CRNA) and the Nurses Association of New Brunswick (NANB) have taken steps to make this path easier, but more work needs to be done across the country.
- A lack of targeted efforts to effectively match skilled tradespeople to jobs: Skill gaps and unfilled labour demand in the construction industry reduce productivity, delay projects, and increase costs. While Canada has programs such as the Federal Skilled Trades Program to attract skilled tradespeople to the country, the challenge lies in effectively deploying them once they arrive. Skilled immigrants ready to work in Canada’s construction sector will play a critical role in building more homes to address Canada’s housing crisis, but further efforts are needed to fully harness the potential of this group.
- An overreliance on immigrant workers to fill entry-level positions in the accommodation and food services sector: Low wages and a lack of skill development and training initiatives lead workers to leave the accommodation and food services sector. Employers in this sector therefore often hire overqualified immigrants who can’t find jobs in their sector of expertise for entry-level positions. A more thorough understanding of the degree of underutilization and employers’ workforce needs in this sector will help design better career path options to ensure immigrant workers can fully apply their skills and talents.
Building the workforce of tomorrow
To solve these challenges and better align the workforce with sector demands, we need to understand where immigrant skills are being underutilized and why. We also need to hear employers’ perspectives, identify opportunities for settlement service providers to provide targeted solutions, and assess local community barriers to effective skill utilization.
Using the latest available data, we will identify which Canadian cities and regions are best aligning immigrants’ skills and talents with labour market gaps.
We will speak with 30 employers across the health, construction, and accommodation and food services sectors, as well as 10 settlement service providers with employment-related programming. We will discuss:
- sector and company barriers to effectively using immigrants’ skills
- gaps in skill assessments and foreign credential recognition
- challenges in hiring, integrating, and retaining immigrant employees
- collaboration with stakeholders to improve immigrant skill utilization
- training initiatives, services, and programs to support employers and employees
Insights from this research will allow us to develop actionable plans to build the workforce of tomorrow.
Get involved
If you’d like to learn more about this project or participate in an interview, please contact Stein Monteiro, Lead Research Associate, Immigration ([email protected]).
