How Immigration Evaluations Can Help Your Professional Practice

You’ve probably heard me talk about how adding immigration evaluations to your professional services is a valuable income stream. While we all love to make a little more money – it’s definitely not the only great benefit!

Throughout my practice in immigration evaluations, I’ve taken away many new skills and opportunities to grow as a person and a professional. I learned so much from all the clients I’ve had the privilege of working with.

If you’ve been thinking about adding immigration evaluations to your services, here’s a little insight into the other ways they can help your professional practice.

Improve Communication Skills

Working with a range of individuals from various CALD (Culturally and Linguistic Diverse) backgrounds requires finding new ways of understanding the nuances and complexities of the full communication circle.

Delivering immigration evaluations will help you develop more robust communication skills as you’re introduced to people who may present you with different communication challenges. 

You may also work with translators, which also requires improving communication skills to ensure nothing is lost in translation and you have all the information you need to complete your paperwork.

Boost Cultural Understanding

As well as languages and linguistic differences, working with people from CALD backgrounds also introduce you to a wide range of cultural diversity – including those from cultural backgrounds you’ve likely not engaged with previously.

I’ve written about this a few times across the blog, but different cultures handle mental health and discuss mental health issues in very different ways. 

Learning the broader cultural understanding of mental health, how different cultures respond, and the ongoing stigma that can permeate different cultural ideas of mental health forms a vital part of our professional practice.

This skill is undoubtedly beneficial for immigration evaluations – but it will definitely help you practice in other areas too.

Learn New Ways of Applying Familiar Skills

As therapists and clinicians, we all have core skill sets that we bring to our work. Over time, we hone these skills through our work and improve each time we apply them.

When we add a new or different service to our professional practice, we still use those skills, but now we can use them in new ways.

This helps to strengthen and grow these skills, improving our work across the board and showing us new ways of applying our skills to benefit more individuals.

On the flip side of this, adding a new service like immigration evaluations can also help shine a light on areas where our skills might need a bit more help (such as cultural understanding or unconscious bias).

Grow Your Network

This might be one of my favorite benefits of doing immigration evaluations!

I love connecting with new people, learning about their lives and work, and seeing where I can help. Whether through our dedicated Immigration Therapists Community, working with other professionals in different fields, such as immigration lawyers, or my clients. 

Growing and being a part of a dedicated and supportive network, all focused on helping others when they need it most, is a core part of why I do the work I do. 

The people we surround ourselves with significantly affect how we experience our days. I am privileged to work and connect daily with the people in my growing network. 

Making a Change

Above all, when you add immigration evaluations to your services, you’ll offer individuals, couples, and families a lifeline of support when they need it most.

The sector always needs caring, dedicated, and empathetic individuals to offer the right level of professional support to help clients gain the security and sense of psychological safety that allows them to heal, settle and grow in their new home.

How Will Immigration Evaluations Help Your Practice?

These are just a few examples of how immigration evaluations have helped my professional practice and what I’ve learned from others sharing how adding these services has helped them as a professional – and as a person.

If you feel ready to start exploring how vital service could help your practice, my free Quick Start Guide is the perfect place to begin.