YMCA Employment & Immigrant Services

Very friendly and helpful staff, and the location it self is clean and calm.

I just had the most incredible experience! I had employment coach Nikki and she was fantastic. Very professional, compassionate and truly went above and beyond with our first meeting. I feel relieved and am excited to start this new journey with an incredible support coach who truly cares about her clients!

The woman, Angela, who is supposed to be helping me find a job does not help at all. I can barely even get a hold of her. She is horrible at communicating. If I were you, I would use the job gym instead.

My husband was non status when I told him to reach out to the Y to see if they could help him find some training example CPR before his PR came through to get ahead of the game. The YMCA flat out refused to talk to him until he got a SIN. very unprofessional. Husband gets PR and gets a coach, he came home with a resume that looked like a grade 2 whipped up. I was furious and told him take it back and have the coach fix it, he didn't. About 3 months of my husband handing out rubbish on paper passes by and the coach says, "oh, let me fix that resume up". So he knew it was trash. He did make the format look more professional but i still had to fix it up. The coach would send over a couple job fairs, but never once offered training on how to address potential employers professionally. Also the job fairs were never in construction which that is my husband's skill. My husband finally decided on training for an AZ license. The employee who dealt with the application was leaving the very next week and my husband was rushed to get all information in by then which he did not, his coach didn't really have a clue as to what he was doing. Just kept telling my husband get his ROI. Anyhow my husband ended uo changing the service from the YMCA after I had to persuade him this place is no help. He moved on to NC employment and they helped him right away with getting on his way to training and assistance with BetterJobsOntario. If you are a new comer to canada please avoid this place there is better help out there. I am happy my husband took my advice and got away from here. Do better YMCA, hire better more knowledgeable staff. Good luck its rough out here

My experience started off great. I came out of my initial appointment buzzing because of all of the ideas my employment coach hadin regards to helping me to find work. The employment coach gave me some websites to apply at and told me they would help me with my resume and sign me up for some micro certifications to give me a boost in the job market. In our meeting my employment coach agreed to sign me up to the micro certification that I was interested in and asked me to send her more info about it via email. Since that conversation and my follow-up email containing the info she requested I've followed up 6 times over the span of a month and a half asking for a status update as to if or when I'll be able to take the certification. That part of the email was always completely ignored. Not even a "hey this week is kinda busy, let's sign you up next week" or "I put in a request so it will take some time. Hold tight!". Instead I received complete radio silence. Because my request for training was completely ignored and weeks started to pass with no progress or relevant correspondence I decided I that I'll just go and try another employment service agency. I once again emailed my coach asking to close my account at the YMCA (because you can't have two open accounts at two different agencies at the same time). Without her closing my account I won't be able to go to another agency. After another extremely delayed response she replied saying that " it will take time to close your account". It's been almost 2 weeks now and still my account hasn't been closed. Because of their delays I've now missed the deadline for the certification that would greatly help me in finding work. The next cohort for the certification takes place in 4 months. So that's another 4 months that I won't be able to apply to jobs that list that certification as a requirement. Essentially my account is now being held hostage. My messages requesting help with the certification were ignored and when I politely asked for my account to be closed she said it would take time (apparently weeks). Its hard for me to imagine that it really takes 2 or more weeks to close my account in which they did almost nothing to help in the first place. I'm coming up on 2 months since I went to YMCA asking for help and feel like I'm worse off than before I went to them as now I can't go to another agency until they finally decide to close my account. Overall extremely unprofessional and disappointing experience. Will definitely not recommend this agency to friends or others who are looking for help in finding work.