Where All Accents Are Welcome

When the Provincial Employment Roundtable incorporated in late 2020, after years of community consultations, conferences, and steering committee work, the question was no longer whether Québec's English-speaking professionals needed better support. The community had been making that case for years. The question was how to actually build something that worked.

PERT's mandate, as Chad Walcott, the organization's Director of Public Affairs, describes it, was "to do research and advocacy and develop programs intended to improve the employment and employability outcomes of English speakers in Québec." The Circonflexe Mentorship Program became one of the first answers. Mentorship, as anyone who has run a program knows, is easy to start and hard to do well. You can match people based on availability, count sessions, and call it a program. PERT's leadership was not interested in that version. The community they were trying to serve had needs that were specific and layered: French-language fluency in professional settings, networks that could open doors, confidence in unfamiliar workplaces, certifications, employment that matched experience. Responding to that with intention meant the program had to be able to allow for both mentee selection and high impact rates.

That is why, when Circonflexe launched, it launched on Mentorly from day one. Not as a tool added later. The decision to invest in intelligent infrastructure before the first session ever ran was a bet on what would become possible if PERT could understand its community in motion and respond with insight rather than assumption.

The Problem With Hoping Mentorship Works

PERT didn't land on mentorship by hunch. It came out of four years of research into how adults actually acquire and perfect a language. "Our research showed that English speakers have barriers in terms of integration into the labor market due to low French proficiency," Chad says. "Our research showed that mentorship was one of the best practices in terms of acquiring and perfecting a language."

The premise was simple enough. Take someone with intermediate French and pair them with someone who'd already crossed the bridge to professional fluency. Let them practice in real conversations, in their actual industry, about the situations they'd actually face. "Our mentors in the program act as a kind of language ambassador to their mentees," Chad says. They're there on a regular basis, week after week, ready to talk shop in French.

Professional French isn't built in a classroom. It gets built in conversations with people who use it at work every day, who hand you the vocabulary, the colloquialisms, the rhythm of how things actually get said.

But running mentorship at this scale is operationally intense. The moment you commit to matching people thoughtfully, by region, by industry, by goals, the complexity becomes punishing.

"I think we got 2000 applicants in the last round of recruitment," Chad says. "So we would have to manage all of those one by one. And it would definitely make the project a bit unfeasible."

PERT needed automated matching, online meetings, the ability to segment by region and industry, and a way to free up the team for the work that genuinely required human judgment, like vetting mentors, building relationships, and paying attention to whether the program was actually working.

"Mentorly was the top choice," Chad says.

For Program Coordinator Michelle Dzbik, the alternative is concrete: "We would probably resort to using spreadsheets or forms. Honestly, I think it would be a lot more complicated to have to approach matching without a platform like Mentorly. It would be a lot more manual. And we'd have to be chasing people down for certain information."

What Participants Actually Asked For

Once the program was up and running, it became clear pretty quickly that people were looking for much more than basic French practice. Yes, improving professional French mattered, but what mentees were really after was confidence. Confidence walking into meetings. Confidence interviewing for jobs. Confidence contributing to conversations without mentally translating every sentence first. A lot of participants were also looking for stronger professional networks, certifications, better employment opportunities, and guidance from someone who had already figured out how to navigate Québec workplaces successfully.

That theme of confidence came up constantly. Across hundreds of mentees, confidence-building in professional settings was the most requested area of support by a wide margin. Communication skills, active listening, networking, intercultural communication, and cultural awareness all followed closely behind. The pattern was hard to miss. People were not necessarily trying to sound perfect. They were trying to feel comfortable enough to participate fully. There is a big difference between technically knowing a language and actually feeling like you belong in professional spaces where that language is spoken every day.

The data also gave PERT a much clearer understanding of where support gaps existed inside the program itself. Michelle saw the same thing reflected in her own conversations with participants. "Confidence is a really big takeaway from this program. Confidence in expressing oneself. And especially with a mentor who is so supportive. That's what allows for that confidence to grow", Michelle reflects.

That is really the gap Circonflexe was designed to close. Some mentorship sessions are casual conversations. Others focus on interview prep, presentation practice, or industry-specific vocabulary. One mentee might want help navigating patient conversations in healthcare, while another needs support speaking confidently during engineering meetings or client calls. The structure is intentionally flexible because real professional growth does not happen the same way for everyone. The mentors meet people where they are, and the conversations evolve around what they actually need in their day-to-day working lives.

What It Actually Feels Like

"It's a very human program," Michelle says. "People are really interested in connecting with each other."

She tells stories of mentors and mentees who started in formal sessions and ended up as friends, going to movies, taking walks, the relationship outgrowing the structure that started it. Underneath all of it is a campaign theme that runs through how the program is designed to feel. "One of the themes of our program," Chad says, "is where all accents are welcome." The point is to give people permission to jump in and make mistakes. "Through practice, through repetition, through regular contact with folks, you'll build that confidence."

One mentee wrote after her first session with her mentor: "Loved this mentorship experience. I have an excellent mentor and I was surprised at the progress I made in expressing myself on this first session." After one session. That's the kind of shift the program is built to create, and the fact that it happened on a first call says something about how carefully the matching works.

Across 274 reviews, and 500+ mentor sessions, Circonflexe averaged a 96% satisfaction rate. What matters more than the numbers, though, is what people kept saying. The same themes, over and over: good matches, real progress, supportive mentors, a program that felt built for them and they feel more confident entering the workplace.

Scale Without Losing the Personal Touch

In eighteen months, hundreds of professionals found mentors who understood their journey. Together, they completed 500+ sessions. Tracked 652 goals. None of it is passive engagement.

People came back because the sessions were worth the time, and they kept coming back even with everything else competing for their attention: jobs, families, intensive language work, the demands of building a life in a new professional context.

Chad credits the satisfaction to one thing: "We were able to give that personalized support and the customized matching for our mentees. And I think that really contributed to their high satisfaction." Mentorly handled the heavy lifting on matching and logistics, which freed Michelle and her team to do what only people can do. Build trust, follow up, pay attention to who needed what.

Michelle says it more directly: "Even with all the technology that's available, you still need humans behind all the work."

The most meaningful number, for Chad, isn't the satisfaction rate. It's something else the data revealed: "Between 95 and 98% of our participants, mentees, felt more confident in speaking in French in their workplace, more able to go to interviews, more able to interact in those spaces without a fear of messing up."

The Mentors Are Getting Something Out of This Too

One of the more surprising patterns in the data had nothing to do with mentees. The mentors were getting something out of the program that ran deeper than goodwill.

"There's a deep sense of giving back on the side of the mentors," Chad says. "So that really drives that sense of belonging, that sense of community." Many learned French as adults themselves and now get to hand the experience forward. The program gave them a way to participate in something larger than their own work.

For mentees, the belonging works the opposite direction. The program is "kind of allowing them to break down the different walls and different myths that exist around the English-speaking community and the French-speaking community," Chad says, "and feel more included because now they're connected with someone in their industry who was acting as their mentor."

PERT's research had shown that some English-speaking professionals had grown discouraged about learning French. They'd come to feel that whatever effort they were making wasn't enough. Circonflexe was, in part, a response to that. "I feel like our program has allowed them to feel like what they're doing is enough and feel welcomed and feel like their efforts are appreciated."

One Program Becomes Five

PERT chose Mentorly partly because it could handle scale. "Mentorly allows us to have these concurrent programs all under the same branding, presenting the same resources and allowing us to kind of track the stats across the province," Chad says. Same visibility, same matching logic, same ability to know what's actually happening in each community. PERT is now beta testing Mentorly in 3 other organizations that they work with!

What's Possible Now

Somewhere in Québec right now, someone is about to send their first message to a mentor.

Maybe it's a software engineer who reads technical documentation in French but hesitates in standups. Maybe it's someone who's been here three months, or three years, and finally decided to stop putting it off.

When they hit send, they're walking into something built deliberately around them. Their goals, their gaps, their industry, their region. They'll be matched with someone who's done what they're trying to do, who'll meet them where they are and help them get to where they're going. Within weeks, they'll have practiced an interview. Asked for vocabulary they didn't know they needed. Heard, from someone whose French sounds the way they want theirs to sound, that what they're already doing is enough.

The work keeps going, and so does the network. In cities and regions across Québec where the need has always been there, more people are about to take that step, supported by mentors who've done it themselves, on a platform that's built to stay out of the way.