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Kiso HQ

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Founder: Ukot Umezinne

Website: www.kisohq.com (external link) 

Equipping black immigrant women with tech sales skills.

Most black immigrant women struggle to land decent high paying jobs after landing in Canada.

Research published in the Journal of International Migration and Integration (2023) on the Influence of Intersectional Identities on the Employment Experiences of Black African Immigrant Women in Ontario, Canada found that "participants struggled in their search for professional jobs in the Canadian labor market due to the lack of recognition of foreign credentials. As a result, they worked in jobs perceived to be of “low status” and experienced poor labor market outcomes.”

Canada is investing heavily in attracting immigrants but the conditions on the ground are discouraging for the majority of these immigrants from races considered visible minorities. The Canadian economy would thrive and be more abundant for the whole if immigrants were empowered financially through well-paying jobs and decent work or business opportunities.

As a black immigrant woman to Canada myself, I experienced first-hand the fact that it would be a struggle to find work in my area of experience - Learning Design - within Canada so I decided to make a career pivot into tech sales, attended a boot camp, and had to take up a commission-only sales job just to be able to add that Canadian experience to my resume.

Kiso HQ’s Black Immigrant Women in Tech Sales (BIW-Ts) initiative is designed get black immigrant women into high-paying tech sales jobs by providing them with:

  • tech sales training
  • interview readiness coaching
  • job matching
  • a dedicated job board
  • a community of practice