Digital Supports for Immigrant Professionals’ Settlement and Information Needs: Developing a Wiki-Style Tool with Intersectional, Targeted Content

Immigrant professionals—who have skills, education, and experience relevant to a given country’s labor needs—are in high demand but face labor market integration and settlement challenges. Those challenges include procedural barriers with recredentialing, licensing requirements, foreign qualification recognition, and other occupational regulations; discriminatory hiring practices and “skill discounting” in the workplace; and issues with making workplace- and/or industry-specific cultural and language adjustments. While the digital space has opened in recent years in both practice and research, this space remains understudied in the context of immigrant settlement services and employment support. This study investigated the digital behaviors and settlement challenges faced by immigrant professionals in Canada, followed by the development and testing of a digital tool, employing a mixed-methods convergent parallel research design. In the first phase, data collection involved a survey and targeted interviews with immigrant professionals. For the second phase, we applied insights from that data to develop and pilot a digital intervention called The Seeker. The digital modality was a wiki-style approach with content including not only general information relevant to all immigrants but also content that was country- and profession-specific. The pilot focused on Filipino nurses, Indian information technology (IT) professionals, and Ukrainian teachers. Our findings raise questions and open new lines of research and practice about digital means of targeting immigrant professionals’ intersectional needs for labor market integration and settlement.