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.