QUEBEC APPLICANTS LETS SHARE EXPERIENCE

[Titoualfruk]

Don't mean to be awful or nasty, but if you can't even navigate a telephone system in French, how on earth do you think you will do with the rest???

Sorry just shows how French is very important.

 

[beautiful-carla]

hello to seniors of this thread...may i know your interpretation on this points for AOT?
"The diploma or degree must have been obtained in the five years previous to applying for Quebec immigration. If this is not the case, the applicant must have worked for at least one year out of the five years in a field directly related to the diploma or degree obtained." .. I finished my Bach of Nursing last April 02, 2008 does it mean i can get 16 points for AOT?...
what does this statement means? The diploma or degree must have been obtained in the five years previous to applying for Quebec immigration?... does it mean in order to avail the 16 points for AOT my Bach Nursing graduation must not be 5 years older? it's been than 5 years and 5 mos since i graduated from my nursing....will i receive 16 points for AOT or not because i finish my nursing 5 years and 5 mos already ....please need help.... Roll Eyes

 

[proreo]

hello to seniors of this thread...may i know your interpretation on this points for AOT?
"The diploma or degree must have been obtained in the five years previous to applying for Quebec immigration. If this is not the case, the applicant must have worked for at least one year out of the five years in a field directly related to the diploma or degree obtained." .. I finished my Bach of Nursing last April 02, 2008 does it mean i can get 16 points for AOT?...
what does this statement means? The diploma or degree must have been obtained in the five years previous to applying for Quebec immigration?... does it mean in order to avail the 16 points for AOT my Bach Nursing graduation must not be 5 years older? it's been than 5 years and 5 mos since i graduated from my nursing....will i receive 16 points for AOT or not because i finish my nursing 5 years and 5 mos already ....please need help.... Roll Eyes

Have you worked in that field for at least a year?

 

[beautiful-carla]

Have you worked in that field for at least a year?

yes, 3 years as clinical instructor and 1 year and 4 mos as intensive care unit nurse...will i get 16 points for AOT and 8 points for Experience?... :

 

[proreo]

yes, 3 years as clinical instructor and 1 year and 4 mos as intensive care unit nurse...will i get 16 points for AOT and 8 points for Experience?... :

I am not deciding so I can't say for sure, but from what you are saying you should get 16 points for AOT.

Have you worked full time? If so, you should get the points for work experience as well

hope that helps!

 

[signalmaker]

I am not sure what this DTMF is . I am using an IPHONE to dial their number, I had been successful in reaching them couple of times few months ago, but never recently. I used to dial 9 immediately after the line becomes active, but nothing works nowadays, atleast if any of you are sure about what to dial to reach an call center executive, please let me know, it will be of great help I can try that with the french version itself.

Swami

change the service provider ...

 

[Geochaddy]

I find exaggerated the last sentence. After 6 months of fruitless job hunting in my field, I am still working in call centre and half of my team has IT degrees from Quebec universities. And we are all fully fluent in French. I can understand that my British PhD is nothing in the eyes of Canadian employers, but I cannot understand why the same applies to their own degrees.

Besides, 1500$ a month is too much unless you want to eat in restaurant every night. I am paying 540$ for one-bed flat close to downtown montreal (all included), 77$ for transport pass, 100$ for telecom bills, and 300$ for food.

The reality is that job prospects for highly qualified professionals are very poor for immigrants no matter how fluent french is. The job offers are not even transparent in terms of criteria. I got a rejection yesterday from university where applied for teaching assistant. They said I did not satisfy the requirements of the university syndicate. What the hell? The job advert did not mention anything about syndicate. How I am supposed to satisfy something I do not know?

Immediately upon landing we (99% of immigrants) are dragged into a swamp of dead-end jobs. The two ways out of dead end jobs are: 1. Get a vocational diploma in an on-demand lower-level skill (assistant nurse, accounting clerk, secretary) and get a job immediately (the employment rate is almost 100% for vocational diploma holders). 2. Become autonomous worker (like insurance or real estate agent) or small business owner.

Thanks for that perspective Ketevan.

 

[Geochaddy]

Don't mean to be awful or nasty, but if you can't even navigate a telephone system in French, how on earth do you think you will do with the rest???

Sorry just shows how French is very important.

Well you are being both awful and nasty as well as insensitive. I am sure when you started to learn french you could not navigate a telephone system, well now you are an expert. Learning the language is a process. This forum was meant for us to support and encourage each other, not to belittle noone so please be patient with the rest of us who have just started the process. It took you quite a while to get to C1, we will get there too but with time.

 

[frege]

Seriously some people are living in cuckoo land.

Have you looked at job offers in Québec? I have and being at C1 & C2 level I am worried I will not find work. Most job offers demand fluent written and spoken English and French, I would say about 95% of the jobs I have viewed.

If you don't want to finish working in McD's, Strabucks or another dead end job, how are you going to do this without French or lots of good luck.

Written and spoken French and English are must haves, not add on options for living in Québec. I am C1 and C2 same level as my other half who is French and trust me I am working hard as f*ck to advance my spoken and written skills in French and he is doing the same in English.

I have not even started to think about writing my CV in both languages, I am even thinking of hiring a professional to do this for me!!!

I have friends who have done intensive language courses and have achieved B2 and even C1 in 6 months, it is possible, but you have to put the effort in.

Before someone flies of the handle, this is my point of view and does not apply to all cases.

I am of course speaking from experience too. So I will give my experience of moving from anglophone to francophone copuntry with basic French.

Basically I arrive in France the 26th March 2006 for a sabatical of 6 months, very little French, in fact the last time I had spoken French was my high school exam which I failed miserably.

After 6 months I decided to stay in France, I have about 80,000€ in the bank and had purchased a house (no mortgage). So I was in a pretty good position financially.

So I bought a car did the weekly shop, paid out for insurance and paid my taxes, unfortunately my other half at the time was not the frugle kind and thought that we could keep spending at the same speed we had done before. This was the start of our problems.

Firstly getting the little one into the local school, try doing that with basic French, trust me complete nightmare, not to mention some other problems that occured at the school. One good point is kids do adapt quickly and do pick up the language at a scary speed, unlike us adults.

So after two years of this that and the other, not working living of the savings, having kept the level of French at the strictly what I needed to know level, my other half comes upto me and says that there is not a lot of money in the bank. I said I know this but that my other half had not reduced the speeding speed.

The comment was well your just going to have to get a job, I am sure you can get a job speaking in English. So off I went to ANPE (french job centre) and was basically just laughed at when they saw my level of labguage and said that I would not find a job in the Charente Region with only English as the fluent language. Mr vous êtes en France ici, nous ne parlerons pas anglais au travaille.

Ok

so after 6 months of trying in the charente I had an interview with a comapny in Marseille, looking for an English person for their English clients. Cool I thought perfect, no problems with that. Had the interview at teh end of the interview was thanked and told in no uncertain terms that I had not got the jobs as I would not be able to communicate with my collegues at the required level. When I left the pffice I was almost in tears. The thought of having to return to the UK becomeing a reality was just not a very nioce feeling.

I then had another few months of agonising, my other half had decided to up sticks and return to the UK, I had given the house I had bought to my other half so that they could sell it and hhave the money to buy something in the UK so that the little one (i am not the dad) had a roof over his head. Cut a long story short we split up...


Just as things were looking bad I got a call from a company in Toulouse looking for an IT helpline person for their sites in the UK but based in Toulouse. Only Englsih required as they have englsih speaking staff. I got the job but still the first year was hell trying to communicate, so I got of my ass and started to learn French, and boy did I learn.


I had had 2 years not working,
Then it took me two years to finds a job that I could do with just English.

I now speak English and French to very high levels C1 & C2 for French and I al trying to change jobs. I have been applying for over a year and have had several interviews, but still they say the French level is not quite high enough.

So when I give comments about French I am speaking from experience, it is important and it is no surprise that they have changed the rules. To me it represents a reality and a level required to integrate correctly into the Québec working environment, I think even B2 is insufficient level.

France is French speaking country and Québec is a French speaking province, they want to keep speaking French and want to protect their language and identity. I understand, it's normal. So it is upto us to adapt. Yeah most people can speak English but do they want to speak English???

Unless you get lucky you are not going to get by with just English in québec and basic French will be good for going to the Epicerie.

Oh by the way Québec French is not exactly the same as French French either, and even for a French person can be difficult to understand as my other half found out in the Restaurant in Québhec and a long history with a Poutine and two old lady servers, who coincidently said they speak Englsih but didn't want to, but we could always go to the other restauarant over the road where they have an Englsih speaking server. The restaurant over the road was of course Mcd's lol

There are some jobs that do require a high level of French proficiency. However, there are many good jobs where you don't need to speak the language perfectly. Usually job ads overstate the true level of bilingualism required. Few Canadians have a C1 level in their second language. So though job ads sometimes say "perfectly bilingual," this rarely means C1 in practice, let alone C2. They also say that you need to be a dynamic team-oriented overachieving self-starter, etc., but of course we're all just regular people, not supermen.

There's a big difference between Canada and France, and that's that here there are two major languages. 8% of Quebecers are anglophones, and probably a further 12% speak a third language as their mother tongue. English has special status in Quebec because it is the other official language of Canada (the native language of 58% of Canadians, versus 23% for French). I live in an area of Montreal where you hear English at least as commonly as you do French.

The result is that it's considered unrealistic to expect everyone to speak French perfectly. Tons of people get by with something like B1, except in jobs where the way you speak or write has special importance. I would say that most "bilingual" federal civil servants you talk to in call centres are about B1 or B2 in their second language. I would say that Quebec government call centre employees who are supposed to be able to serve you in English are even sometimes A2, based on my experience, though more commonly B1. Obviously, the Quebec government ones have a much higher level in French, because this is a real job requirement.

All of this sometimes causes communication problems, but it's something we're used to as a bilingual society. So even if an immigrant is B1 in English and B1 in French, we won't have any more difficulty with them than what we're already used to with francophones speaking English or anglophones speaking French. We live with it.

Most exceptions concern people who will be producing written material to be read externally to the company. They need to have good written French. The same goes for journalists, teachers, etc. In these cases, you might need C2 if you're working in French. I doubt that nurses, doctors, etc., ever really need more than B2, and in an English-language hospital you can get by with much less French than that.

 

[raistlin17phil]

Thank you proreo, but here is the problem, everytime I call up BIQ, i could not get any English Response, Even if I press 9 "For service in English please press 9", it end up with french messages like press 1, press 2 and no English follows, hence my preblem. Is there anyway I can get English response from call center ?

I've had the same problem before and it turns out later when I advanced in my French skills, I was calling them after office hours! If you call them after office hours, they have these "information capsules" and even if I pressed the English option, the recorded message was still in French because there were no English Information Capsules that time when I called. And true enough, like yours, it asks me to press 1 or 2 in French... So I called them up again during their office hours and bingo! I just waited until the message reverted to English, and it was about pressing 9 (?) if I wanted service in English. That has been months ago when I had the problem, though, and I've always called them within office hours after that and I've never had any more problems. You might want to try that and see if it resolves your problem.

 

[raistlin17phil]

Thank you for the clarification.

Yeah, Subash, it's just a receipt. In mine, is shows the number of applicants (1) and the fee paid ($750).

 

[raistlin17phil]

Badluck ...!! i begin to hate myself because this worst cas scenario :'(

Yeah, sometimes life throws a hardball at us, but what's important is to not close our eyes to opportunities that may come, no matter how little, and throw our best shot at them.

 

[raistlin17phil]

hello to seniors of this thread...may i know your interpretation on this points for AOT?
"The diploma or degree must have been obtained in the five years previous to applying for Quebec immigration. If this is not the case, the applicant must have worked for at least one year out of the five years in a field directly related to the diploma or degree obtained." .. I finished my Bach of Nursing last April 02, 2008 does it mean i can get 16 points for AOT?...
what does this statement means? The diploma or degree must have been obtained in the five years previous to applying for Quebec immigration?... does it mean in order to avail the 16 points for AOT my Bach Nursing graduation must not be 5 years older? it's been than 5 years and 5 mos since i graduated from my nursing....will i receive 16 points for AOT or not because i finish my nursing 5 years and 5 mos already ....please need help.... Roll Eyes

I think it means that if you don't have work experience directly related to your diploma, then for you to get points, you need to have that diploma at least within 5 years from the date of your filing of application. In your case, you already have worked more than 1 year in a field directly related to your diploma, and this work experience is within the last 5 years. So, regardless if you had your diploma 10 years ago, for as long as you have work experience related to it within the last 5 years of filing your application, you're qualified. Yes, you should get your 16 points in AOT, and 10 points (or so) in your Education, plus the points corresponding to your years of experience (in the field directly related to your diploma).

 

[swamik]

I've had the same problem before and it turns out later when I advanced in my French skills, I was calling them after office hours! If you call them after office hours, they have these "information capsules" and even if I pressed the English option, the recorded message was still in French because there were no English Information Capsules that time when I called. And true enough, like yours, it asks me to press 1 or 2 in French... So I called them up again during their office hours and bingo! I just waited until the message reverted to English, and it was about pressing 9 (?) if I wanted service in English. That has been months ago when I had the problem, though, and I've always called them within office hours after that and I've never had any more problems. You might want to try that and see if it resolves your problem.

I called them around 12 noon, possibly they are out for lunch and hence the French voice options, I will anyway try out during 9 -10 AM, Thank you...

 

[darshmodi]

Good morning friends
As per the discussion going on currently in our forum I think there are very less chance for Asia for the next mission because till date no one has mentioned that he got an email from biq Montreal for the interview like some african members.

pls share if someone has any update

Regards