Training Needs Assessments of Newcomer Young Adult Mothers (2022) 

What is this Research About? 

This research assessed the settlement and employment support and training needs of newcomer young adult mothers in Toronto. Researchers sought to understand their strengths, networks, social support, and career goals.   

Newcomer mothers in Canada face many challenges as they try to settle into a new country while also navigating early motherhood. These women have valuable skills and experiences. But they face barriers. These include limited childcare, language issues, cultural differences, and social isolation. Many feel stuck. They lack information about resources, which are often hard to find or insufficient to meet their needs. Employment is a major hurdle. They face discrimination in hiring, unclear job requirements, and few chances to gain the skills they need for the Canadian workforce. These challenges force many to put their career plans on hold.   

Services exist to help with health, employment, and social needs. But these resources are not always accessible or well-advertised to newcomer mothers. Many struggle to understand how their skills fit into the Canadian labour market. They need more guidance to transfer their qualifications or build new ones. Settlement and employment services can make a big difference. They can help the women map out their strengths, navigate available resources, and better prepare for jobs in Canada. Service providers need to make more efforts to ensure these services are inclusive and easy to access. 

What Did the Researchers Find? 

Researchers identified key support opportunities to meet settlement needs, and supports needed to find employment:  

Skill building:

• Settlement: language, communication, networking. 
• Employment: Job search strategy and skills, Technical, computing and business communication skills. 

Accessing Information:

• Settlement: support system navigation, including access to childcare, health and mental health resources, and cultural competency.  
• Employment: navigating employment information, systems, and resources, employment rights, networking, mentoring, career advancement techniques, language & communication, workplace cultural competency.  

Newcomer young adult mothers have significant assets, social capital, and specific employment goals. But they continue to face barriers.  

Assets:   

• Newcomer young adult mothers have rich professional and educational backgrounds. 75% have post-secondary degrees. 
• They have diverse backgrounds (e.g., healthcare, teaching, engineering). But they struggle to transfer these skills to the Canadian job market.  

Social Capital:  

• They receive support from 1-on-1 connections, family and community connections, as well as agencies and organizations.  
• They rely heavily on family and community-level connections for information about employment and settlement.  

Employment Goals:   

• 74% were unemployed at the time of the study.   
• Their career interests are diverse across many sectors. These include education, healthcare, childcare, and community services, information technology, and marketing.  
• Many prefer flexible or remote jobs due to childcare responsibilities.  

Key Challenges:   

• Most put careers, self-care, and self-development on hold. Mothers had to handle childcare with no support, leave, or time.  
• Specific settlement challenges include employment and financial challenges, issues with shelter, psychosocial factors.  
• Many faced unsafe or unaffordable housing conditions.  
• Other challenges, like language and communication barriers, create isolation. They limit access to the labor market and information.   
• Participants noted several issues with employment. They cited a lack of information, unclear job requirements, and poor job search skills. They also mentioned challenges with language, communication, and the job market. And, as always, a lack of Canadian experience came up as an employment challenge. 

What Do You Need to Know? 

Immigrant women in Canada face unique vulnerabilities, especially during motherhood. These intersect with settlement challenges like housing, jobs, and language barriers.     

Access Alliance and Toronto Neighbourhood Group (TNG) collaborated on a training needs assessment. It aimed to assess the training needs of newcomer young adult mothers. The study focused on understanding their existing strengths and challenges. It also identified specific training requirements to achieve their career goals.  

Data on the needs of young adult newcomer mothers (ages 18-29, immigrants within the last five years) is limited. This study is vital to understand their situation. Most participants were new mothers and all were primary caregivers. They all had put plans for employment and self-advancement on hold. But they all had employment aspirations.  

What Did the Researchers Do?  

Researchers reviewed reports and environmental scans to understand the context and background before and while administering the surveys. The researchers employed a mixed-methods approach over nine weeks (April-June 2022):  

 Quantitative Component:   

• Online semi-structured surveys via SurveyMonkey   
• 30 valid survey responses analyzed from 124 total submissions  

Qualitative Component:   

• One focus group discussion with 7 participants  
• Three one-to-one in-depth interviews  
• Virtual sessions conducted with randomly selected participants  
• One immigrant insight fellow and two trained peer researchers facilitated the focus group and interviews. 

How Can You Use This Research? 

For Service Providers:   

• Design comprehensive training programs addressing both settlement and employment needs.  
• Help newcomer mothers map their strengths in the labour market.  
• Focus on networking skills, job-specific applications, and technical skills development.  
• Help them understand skill transferability.  
• Include cultural competency training and mental health support.  

For Policymakers:   

• Develop policies addressing childcare accessibility and support.  
• Create programs targeting financial literacy and housing support.  
• Consider using interdisciplinary approaches in support service program design. They should meet the unique needs of newcomer young adult mothers.  

For Future Research:  

• Conduct larger-scale studies to validate findings.  
• Investigate the intersectionality between mothers’ strengths and labour market participation.  
• Examine the long-term outcomes of training interventions. 

Study authors 

Authors: Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Services, Toronto Neighbourhood Group (TNG) Community Services. 

Related Access Alliance Activities 

Like Wonder Women, Goddesses and Robots: how immigrant women are impacted by and respond to precarious employment (2014) 
The experiences and voices of immigrant women, specifically those from racialized backgrounds, have largely been missing in mainstream research, policy framing and public debates about labour market and economic issues in Canada. Access Alliance brought together a cross-sectoral research team tasked with bringing into sharp focus the experiences and voices of immigrant women facing labour market barriers. Study results provide rich insights about how racialized immigrant women face triple intersecting layers of barriers and inequalities – based on gender, race and migration (immigration/newcomer status) – as they attempt to find a good job, negotiate work-life balance, and take care of their family within post-migration context in Canada. 

Working Rough, Living Poor: Employment and Income Insecurities faced by Racialized Groups and their Impacts on Health (2011) 
This study reveals how racialized people are being pushed into protracted conditions of precarious employment and income insecurity, and how existing employment training services and job search supports often prove ineffective. Results from this study indicate that racialized people face numerous systemic barriers, discrimination and challenges that prevent them from finding stable employment that they want. Lack of accessible and affordable childcare is a major systemic impediment to finding and keeping stable employment, particularly for low-income racialized women. 

Where are the Good Jobs? Ten case stories of “working rough, living poor.” (2013) 
This report contains ten powerful case stories of immigrant families from racialized backgrounds who are struggling to find good jobs in Canada. The stories are based on results from the third phase of a community based research project conducted by the Income Security, Race and Health (ISRH) team in Toronto. The stories reveal the multiple factors pushing racialized immigrants into precarious work including systemic discrimination, limited professional network, immigration related barriers, temp agencies, policy gaps, ineffective services, and conditions of precarious employment itself. 

For more information contact research@accessalliance.ca