Skilled Migrant Professionals October 2014 | Page 31
Migration
own organisation, nor old friends within other businesses, as many local workers are.
“It’s also important to realise that even within meetings at work the migrant workers may feel
excluded or alone, unable to have their say or sometimes to understand exactly what is going
on,” Wilson says.
“In the workplace you must get them a ‘buddy’. Introduce them to a peer who can ask how
they went in the meetings, whether they made good connections, how everything is going, is
there anything they didn’t understand. Top accounting firms do this for women returning from
maternity leave – they put them together with a colleague who keeps them abreast of what has
happened since they’ve been away.
“It’s important to have someone in place whose job it is to make sure this person is localising
and who can help them out. But also the migrant worker has to know they have to work hard
to build relationships of their own. This buddy system is not a permanent umbilical cord, it’s just
a crutch until they can walk on their own.”
Yu stresses that it is important not to patronise migrant workers and believes a great deal of
thought must go in to the mentor match-up.
“Scholarly literature suggests that it’s very important to be matched with the right mentor. If it
is assumed that migrant professionals should always be paired up with someone from their own
country, all parties might suffer from relative poverty in their network,” Yu says.
“Such a relationship may offer assurance or validation of difficulties they’re having and I don’t
want to undermine the importance of that. But we would hope that they also get the type of
advice that helps them move upwards and build their career. This is not just for their benefit. This
research is motivated by how society benefits from having a healthy professional community.”
9,000
foreign-born
migrant accountants
a year have been
welcomed under
Australia’s skilled
migration program
during the past
seven years.