Proving and Moving Skills (POWER)

Project Leads

Anna Triandafyllidou, Marshia Akbar

Team Members

Rupa Banerjee, Muhammad Rehman Zafar

Cluster: ADTs for Immigrant Labour Market Integration and (Re)Training

Underutilized immigrant talent costs Canada nearly $50 billion annually. Despite a highly selective immigration system, skilled newcomers cannot access jobs matching their qualifications while employers report shortages. Educational Credential Assessments are rarely used by employers, and no mechanism verifies soft skills such as communication, adaptability, and teamwork. Small and medium employers, with limited HR capacity, struggle most to assess international qualifications.

The project has two aims. The first is to assess the growing array of AI-powered tools that promise to improve skill transfer and recognition — tools marketed to employers, migrants, and stakeholders working on labour market integration, but whose outcomes remain unclear. The assessment examines their efficiency and effectiveness for each of these groups, and asks whether they in fact make immigrant skills more visible.

The second is to generate innovative technology, AI, and human-centred solutions that enhance the visibility, verifiability, and recognition of internationally acquired skills and experience — including professional experience and soft skills, not only formal credentials. Together the two aims clarify whether closing the gap is primarily a matter of settlement policy, such as refocusing settlement services on employer engagement, or of tool design, such as a modular platform offering additional ways for newcomers to demonstrate skills in forms employers recognize.

1. Why are immigrant skills — including professional experience and soft skills, not only educational credentials — not visible to Canadian employers?
2. Do AI-powered tools currently on the market help migrants move and prove their skills, and how efficient and effective are they for employers, migrants, and integration stakeholders?
3. Which policy and programmatic initiatives can facilitate the moving and proving of skills: is this primarily a question of settlement policy or of tool design?
4. What technology, AI, and human-centred solutions can make internationally acquired skills and experience more visible, verifiable, and recognizable to employers?

The project combines stakeholder engagement with design-based innovation. Seven to eight small workshops will be held in locations across Canada between September 2026 and June 2027, together with meetings with employers, employer associations and chambers of commerce, immigrant employment councils, large public and corporate employers, and consultancy firms. These sessions surface the reasons immigrant skills remain invisible and test whether existing AI tools address them.

In parallel, Build a Bridge runs a twelve-week experiential learning program and innovation competition in which multidisciplinary student teams build minimum viable products, working alongside researchers, employers, community organizations, and innovation experts.

• Build a Bridge Innovation Challenge

• Immigrant Employment Council of BC (IEC-BC) (external link) 
  
• Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) (external link) 

This project is ongoing. The workshop and stakeholder meetings phase and the Build a Bridge Innovation Challenge are running in parallel.
Expected completion phase: Fall 2028

Skills recognition; immigrant employment; artificial intelligence; credential assessment; labour market integration