From Dhaka to Toronto: What an Irish Career Coach Taught Me About Starting Over.

George Brown College has a philosophy that stuck with me from day one: “City is Our Classroom.” I did not fully understand what that meant until a few months into the Digital Media Marketing program that I’m undertaking. Sessions like the one we had with Kev Lawler happened, and it clicked completely.

Kev is the founder of the The Whiteboard Collective, a career placement organization that has helped nearly 600 people land jobs in Toronto and beyond. He is a fast-talking Irish immigrant who sold a technology recruiting firm, built a career from scratch in Canada, and now helps out students and newcomers who are going through the same uncertain journey he once went through himself.

The session was held on Zoom, which meant classmates from across the Greater Toronto Area were all in the same room digitally. Different backgrounds, different countries, different industries. That mix alone made the conversation richer than most.

Three lessons from that session will stay with me for a long time.

Take a blended approach or you will only get one kind of result

Kev made an analogy I found genuinely useful. He said that if you only do cardio at the gym, you only get cardio results. Job searching works the same way. Applying online nonstop without networking is like doing the same exercise every single day and wondering why nothing changes.

This hit home. When I arrived in Toronto from Bangladesh, I leaned heavily on applications. I had over five years of digital marketing experience, an MBA, certifications in HubSpot, Google Ads, Meta Blueprint, and results that included helping drive over $48 million in real estate sales in Bangladesh. On paper, the background was strong. In practice, the phone was not ringing the way I expected. Kev explained why. Without Canadian context and without human connection, even a solid profile floats in a sea of noise.

His advice was not to abandon digital outreach. It was to combine it with attending networking events, reaching out to actual hiring managers inside the departments you want to work in, rather than just talent acquisition teams, and building real relationships over time without an obvious transactional ask attached.

Your international experience is only as valuable as how you articulate it

This was the most personally meaningful thing Kev said. He was asked by a classmate from the Philippines, who had strong international experience, whether her strong background counted for employers without Canadian experience. His answer was that international experience is only as valuable as your ability to communicate its value clearly, with measurable outcomes, to someone who was not there to witness it.

That reframing was important for me. I spent four years managing performance marketing at one of Bangladesh’s leading real estate companies. My campaigns contributed to 103 apartment sales in four months. Those numbers are real. But saying “I worked in digital marketing in Bangladesh” lands differently than saying “I ran integrated paid campaigns that generated over $48 million in sales in one quarter.” The experience is the same. The articulation changes everything.

Since arriving in Toronto, I have been building the local layer on top of that foundation. Volunteering as a Social Media Manager at a local blogging platform, completing an apprenticeship with a New York-based entrepreneur, and maintaining a 3.82 GPA at George Brown have been my way of showing commitment to the Canadian market, while my international track record speaks to what I am capable of executing.

Quality beats quantity, especially on LinkedIn

Kev said something about LinkedIn that I had never heard framed quite this way. He said that in an environment full of noise, quality wins. Posting the same motivational quote you saw someone else post is not going to differentiate you. Reaching out to a hiring manager with a vague “just wanted to connect” message is not going to move anything forward.

His advice was to be researched, direct, and specific. Explain exactly why you are reaching out. Make your value clear in plain language that someone outside your field could understand. If you can explain a marketing strategy to someone with no marketing background, Kev argued, you truly understand it. That level of clarity is what gets remembered in a networking conversation and in an interview.

Kev also reminded us that Canada, and Toronto in particular, is a country and city that people choose intentionally. That choice matters. There is something meaningful about deciding to build a life in a place rather than just being born into it.

There is a reason I chose Toronto as well over every other city in Canada when I moved from Dhaka. This city is one of the most diverse talent markets in North America. Kev himself pointed out during the session that Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish, and Mandarin are becoming genuine professional advantages here, because the companies serving these communities need people who can authentically communicate with them.

Digital marketing in Toronto is not one industry. It touches finance, insurance, technology, entertainment, healthcare, and more. Organizations like Scotiabank, American Express, MLSE, and hundreds of others are actively hiring people who understand diverse audiences and can execute across platforms. That is exactly the kind of environment where my background across Bangladesh and North America becomes an asset rather than a question mark.

George Brown’s “City is Our Classroom” philosophy became real with a room full of international students talking about bias, barriers, and how to get through both. I am grateful to have been in the session, and I am applying the lessons learned one step at a time.