'Upwardly Global' Brings Professional Training For Skilled Immigrants To Detroit
DETROIT (WWJ) -- There are 1.8 million skilled immigrants who are college-educated but unemployed or are working in low-skilled jobs in the United States with hundreds of them are in the Detroit area.
Upwardly Global, an organization dedicated to helping foreign-trained individuals find employment in their chosen professions, opened an office in Detroit on Monday.
Dr. Ahmed Hamdi and his family fled war-torn Iraq in 2006 and finished his medical training in Jordan. Hamdi and his wife, who is also a physician, came to Detroit last year and were able to ace one of the biggest roadblocks to employment for an immigrant -- the interview -- with the help of Upwardly Global.
"Upwardly Global were so helpful," Hamdi said. "They helped us first over the phone -- we did a couple of phone interviews. They tried to train us and then they brought people to do live training for simulations for the interviews."
The Upwardly Global office is located on the Michigan State University satellite campus in Midtown Detroit on Woodward Ave.
"It was so, so helpful." Hamdi said. "They taught us with some of the mistakes we were doing -- 'you shouldn't say this, you should say that' -- it helped a lot so that when we went to real interviews, we had much more confidence."
Both Hamdi and his wife eventually found work at Detroit-area hospitals. Upwardly Global is also launching its global engineers and residents program to specifically target foreign-trained engineers for employment in the Detroit area.
