IT Tips in Toronto

Happy New Year, readers! (Can I still say that… on January 26th?)
To start off our 2017 Blogging Year, I would like to share with you a contribution from one of our Community Connections Participants! He is a returning blogger, sharing his experience as an IT professional integrating into life in Toronto. Enjoy 🙂

This group of posts will be my contribution to WoodGreen, who has helped me to improve my skills linked to the foreign language, job search process, and other cultural topics, according to my last post.  Having lived in Toronto for around one year, I think my experience can be helpful, and these pieces of advice can contribute to and leverage your Canadian experience, and help other people as well!

My first piece of advice in regards to being an internationally trained IT professional, is participating in Canadian information technology (IT) meetups.

Like WoodGreen’s Community Connections’ English Conversation Circles and presentations about employment topics, meetups are excellent interactive practices to learn something new and meet new people.

Below, I suggest three groups from meetup.com:

ExploreTech: Monthly, it presents different topics in full stack software development, promotes experienced and new speakers, and encourages women in IT.

CivicOpenData: Weekly, it brings short presentations about open data in Canada. After that, groups are formatted to discuss projects in collaboration with community or government.

DevTO: It shows a mixture of topics for developers, architects, designers, recruiters and leaders, on a monthly basis.

Of course, I have participated in others, because there are many interesting meetups in Toronto, but this is a small list based on my preferences.

In my next posts, I will show more IT tips like library resources, challenges and hackathons, and volunteer opportunities in IT area for guests and newcomers.

Before finishing, I have two important tips from WoodGreen’s Community Connections’ programs:

Check this web page, as it has many types of general volunteer positions.

Subscribe to the Community Connections newsletter, by sending an email to Teresa Tao at ttao@woodgreen.org. She is the Community Connections Group Activities Coordinator and shares information about volunteerism and other activities, weekly.

If you have any suggestion, please let me know about it. You can find me here.

See you later,

Alexandre Belloni Alves, Systems Analyst

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