TRIEC Mentoring Partnership

The Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) was founded in 2003 by Maytree and the Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance to close the employment gap facing skilled immigrants in the Greater Toronto Area. In 2004, working with TD Bank Group, it launched the TRIEC Mentoring Partnership, pairing newly arrived, internationally trained professionals with established Canadian professionals in the same field for structured, roughly four-month mentoring relationships.

What it does: mentees get industry-specific coaching, a local professional network and guidance on Canadian workplace norms. The programme has logged over 27,000 cumulative mentoring matches through a coalition of 27 employer partners (including TD and RBC) and 12 community partners, and TRIEC has helped the model spread to six other Canadian cities and to New Zealand.

Results: a 2020 external evaluation by Blueprint ADE, commissioned with funding from Employment and Social Development Canada, compared mentees to a matched control group sourced through World Education Services. It found mentees were about 2.5 times more likely to be in a 'good quality job' (full-time, permanent, with benefits and advancement potential) and nearly 4 times more likely to have expanded their professional network within three months of finishing the programme. TRIEC's own programme tracking separately reports 77% of mentees finding work in their field within six months and 85% of employed mentees in permanent, full-time roles; the external evaluation found the largest gains for female newcomers and previously unemployed participants.

Why it's a good practice: unlike most talent-retention initiatives, which report only self-collected numbers, TRIEC's model has been tested against a control group by an independent evaluator, and the same one-on-one mentoring structure has since been replicated by other cities.

Read the full analysis: https://www.mentoringpartnership.ca/

Read the full analysis: https://www.mentoringpartnership.ca/