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"This job really helps you make a difference in people's lives."
For Mathai Nooranal, helping families is one of the key motivators driving his career as a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant (RCIC). He runs his own practice, Fairworld Immigration Consulting; his expertise has also led to additional consulting work for another firm. Nooranal began looking at immigration consulting after becoming a permanent resident in 2019.
"I was practising as a chartered accountant before I moved here from India," he explains. "Then COVID hit, and I was wondering what I should do — I could continue as a CPA, but I wanted a change." His own experience moving to Canada had shown him the value of expert counsel on immigration. In his own community, he saw the need for this kind of expertise: "a lot of people were asking me how to go about doing this, what path I took, how they could get professional help," he says. "I realized that this is something that can really help people."
Graduating from the program, Nooranal became an RCIC, and founded a practice with a particular focus on family and spousal sponsorship. "I help a lot of families reunite in Canada, help people bring their spouses and their children to become permanent residents in Canada," he says. "I also help with study permits, work permits and visitor visas, but spousal sponsorships are my main focus."
Nooranal's experience as a chartered accountant gave him the attention to detail and analytical skills that allowed him to thrive in the Graduate Diploma program. It was the real-world aspects of the program that he found particularly insightful when preparing to work as an RCIC. "The program has the right instructors to teach us using their own experience in their respective fields and areas of immigration law," he says. "The program was very in-depth, and you get to look at how to handle real-world cases and practice real-world scenarios. This really helped me ease into practice."
With his experience and passion for reuniting families, Nooranal recalls the family class immigration course as especially formative. "It was fantastic," he says, "and provided the foundation that made it easy to transition into doing this work."
His approach to consulting includes clients in the process. "Since you can do the best you can and an application may still not be approved," he explains, "the best way to mitigate the negatives is to ensure your clients are part of the application journey. We work together to gather details, and build their case together in steps. In the end, the client knows we've done the best we can; they feel a sense of control and that they're part of the application process."
"I really appreciate the way Queen's University equipped me with what I need to be successful in this career," Nooranal says. "This profession can have its ups and downs, but mostly it's good: it helps you reunite families in Canada. It helps people bring their relatives over. There's a lot of satisfaction."