Intersections on the road to skills’ transferability: The role of international training, gender, and visible minority status in shaping immigrant engineers’ career attainment in Canada

Abstract

This paper focuses on the engineering profession in Canada, a regulated field with a large proportion of internationally trained professionals. Using Canadian census data, this study addresses two main questions. First, I ask whether immigrant engineers who were trained abroad are at increased disadvantage in gaining access (1) to employment in general, (2) to the engineering field, and (3) to professional and managerial employment within the field. Second, I ask how immigration status and the origin of training intersect with gender and visible minority status to shape immigrant engineers’ occupational outcomes. The results reveal that immigrant engineers who were trained abroad are at increased risk of occupational mismatch and this risk is two-fold and intersectional. First, they are at a disadvantage to enter the engineering field. Second, those employed in the engineering field are more likely to occupy technical positions. These forms of disadvantage intensify and diversify for women and racial/ethnic minority immigrants. The paper concludes with a discussion of immigrants’ skills transferability in regulated fields from an intersectional perspective.