When Sarah Stockdale graduated from her Master of Professional Communications program at the Toronto Metropolitan University , she had two very different job offers on the table. One was with a well-established and traditional PR firm on Bay Street, and offered great pay and a stable and predictable career path . The other was a three-month contract at an accounting software startup called Wave that paid next to nothing.
“One, not a lot of talent, specifically in Canada, for really in-demand jobs,” Stockdale said. From her own experience recruiting talent and building out growth teams, Stockdale noticed that Americans were being hired more often, even for Canadian companies, since the local talent pool wasn’t as extensive.
“When you come into Growclass, you have to be applying it to something. If you are working at a company and your company is funding you to come, you are running the experiments on the company that you are working at. If you have your own startup or personal project, you are running your experiments on that.
Having grown up within the startup environment, usually one of only a handful of women, she knows how difficult it can be to have no one around who thinks or looks like you. She often felt the pressure to act like one of the guys, something she calls the ‘cool girl syndrome.’ And she wishes she’d had a supportive community where she could just be herself, inst
“ our cohort who graduated in March, the women are seeing an average salary increase of 26%, racialized folks see an average salary increase of 44%, and two 2SLGBTQ folks have seen an average salary increase of 34%. And it's 11% overall, upon completing. So that's a bit of a snapshot.”