Stop Surviving, Start Living: How Newcomers Build Community in Canada
Dennis Agbegha came to Canada as a geoscientist and started over in a call centre. On the show, he talked about what changed when he stopped trying to just survive here and started trying to actually live, and why community, not credentials, ended up being the thing that got him there.
From Geoscientist to Call Centre: A Career Restart in Calgary
Dennis Agbegha didn't move to Canada to work in a bank. He came as a geoscientist, with a masters from Imperial College London and years of experience at Shell and ExxonMobil doing seismic interpretation. He applied for permanent residence through the skilled worker stream, using his geoscience occupation to land in Calgary.
Then oil prices crashed. Companies were laying off geologists, and there was no job for him to even apply to. So he took a survival job at ATB's call centre. That job turned into small business banking, then a senior manager role, then a move to BDC working with entrepreneurs. Eight years later, he's still there.
He tells people now not to define themselves by their work. "That is what you do. That is not who you are," he says. His own career went from geology to finance without him ever planning it that way.
Why "Just Surviving" Isn't Enough
When the job offers didn't come, Agbegha asked himself why he'd moved to Canada in the first place. His answer was that he wanted to live life, not just be alive. That distinction became his compass.
It wasn't easy to hold onto. Coming from a culture where a person's standing reflects on their whole family, he wondered what people back home would think of him working in a call centre after leaving a geoscience career. Was he a failure? He had those thoughts. But he kept telling himself he wasn't going to stop there, and he tried to be the best at whatever job was in front of him while he waited for something more.
The Cultural Shift Nobody Warns You About
One of the bigger adjustments was realizing what actually earns respect in Canada. Where he grew up, he says, status came from money. Here, he found that what mattered more was being a contributing member of the community, whether or not you had anything to gain from it. People volunteered even when they had plenty else going on. They mentored kids who weren't their own. That took him by surprise.
Adjusting meant changing his mindset from "we and them" to just "us." In practice, that meant showing up. He started with free events, because a call centre paycheque didn't leave room for much else, and he kept going even on nights when his shift ended at 10 or 11pm. He'd know one person at an event, that person would introduce him to another, and the network grew from there.
LinkedIn Is for Relationships, Not Job Requests
When Agbegha first got on LinkedIn, he treated it like a job application. He messaged people directly: "My name is Dennis. I just came. I'm a geologist. I have experience in this, this, this." Nobody responded.
He changed his approach. Now he uses LinkedIn to build actual relationships: commenting on what people post, congratulating them on things he noticed, sharing short posts, three or four lines, about what he learned at an event or saw at work, usually with a picture attached because people respond to images before they read a word. He avoids posting about conflict or anything divisive, and tries to stay someone people on any side feel comfortable talking to.
His pet peeve is watching people comment "I'm interested" under a job posting and expect a response. It rarely works, he says. What works is reaching out directly, explaining why the role fits, and asking for a short conversation.
Approachability Can Be Learned
Agbegha doesn't think you need to become an extrovert to build a network. His advice is to get curious instead, and to notice what you're signalling to other people. He once watched someone slump in a chair at an event, head down, and realized the person had made themselves unapproachable without saying a word.
He learned a related lesson from a friend's story about showing up to sign a business deal while exhausted, and being told by the other side to come back another day. His friend said no, he was there, and he was staying. Agbegha has held onto that. If he can't show up fully present, he doesn't go at all.
He also warns against what he calls the glass eye look, the moment someone realizes you're not the deal they were after and visibly loses interest. He's watched it end conversations before they really started. His rule is to treat people as people, not transactions, because you never know who refers you next. One of his best clients came through a referral made by his masseuse.
By the end of the conversation, his advice for newcomers came down to one shift: stop asking what you can get, and start asking what you can give. He talked about a security guard at an event who remembered him a full year later as the only person who had asked how she was doing. It cost him nothing to ask. She never forgot it.
Key takeaways
- Your work is not your identity. Careers can and do change, and that can happen at 30 or at 60.
- Build community before you need something from it. Relationships that start with genuine interest hold up; the ones that start as a pitch usually don't.
- On LinkedIn, give before you ask. Comment, congratulate, and post about your real life; a cold job request to a stranger rarely gets a reply.
- Approachability is made of small, controllable signals, not personality type. Check what your posture and expression are telling people before you assume nobody wants to talk to you.