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Luki Danukarjanto is a soft skills coach, author, and the founder of Focus Inspired. After starting his career as a computer scientist and spending over 12 years in management consulting at Deloitte, he now helps ambitious professionals build the human skills that formal education never taught them. He is also the author of SIWIKE: Stuff I Wish I Knew Earlier, a practical guide to career leverage for professionals navigating their next chapter.
In his episode, Luki and I I chat about:
Why "Canadian experience required" is, in his words, the polite Canadian way of saying "I don't believe you can do the job"
How communication became the single most critical skill for newcomers in this market
How AI is reshaping what signals employers use to decide who even gets an interview
What the human skills toolkit actually looks like, and why mindset is the meta skill underneath all of it
Why "get better at communication" is useless advice, and what to focus on instead
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Chapters
0:00 Average doesn't cut it anymore
0:34 Intro
1:42 Why Luki calls soft skills "human skills"
3:07 From computer science to consulting to coaching
7:33 How immigrants mirror lost students in the job search
10:39 From hard skills to human skills
12:51 The one skill that gets you hired
17:55 Stress is't a threat
23:43 The human skills toolkit
26:14 What AI is doing to the hiring process
33:32 The biggest mistake immigrants make at work
40:19 Why you can't just "get better at soft skills"
48:15 Outro
Some takeaways
The concept of "Canadian experience" gets treated like a credential gap, but Luki believes it's a communication problem. Employers aren't withholding jobs because newcomers lack local context. They're withholding jobs because they can't see the value clearly enough to take the risk. So this probably means that this is a fixable thing, right?
"Get better at communication" is useless advice. Nobody gets better at basketball by trying to get better at basketball. You work on dribbling, on your shot, on reading the court. Soft skills are the same. Stand up straighter. Look someone in the eye. Slow down when you speak. Those are skills you can actually practice.
Relationships are the real hiring mechanism. As Luki puts it, "It's not what you know, it's not who you know, it's who knows you." Some immigrants I talk to understand this in theory and delay it in practice. They wait until they need the network before they build it. By then, the savings are low and the pressure is high, and asking for help from strangers you've never invested in is nearly impossible. The time to build is before you need it.
Links
Where to find Luki:
Check out the FOCUS Inspired website
Check out the FOCUS Inspired YouTube
The Newcomers resources:
Want to work with us? Check out The Newcomers Media Kit.
Want more immigrant interviews? Listen to The Newcomers Podcast.
Looking to find out what Canadian immigration program you’re eligible for? Check out our Who’s Eligible For series.
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