Nobody Will Train You, But Everyone Will Smile: Onboarding in Cambodia vs. Canada

🇰🇭 Cambodia · 🇨🇦 Canada

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Phnom Penh, your first day of work might include an invitation to a colleague's cousin's wedding before anyone has shown you where the printer is. In Toronto, you may receive a 40-page onboarding deck, a calendar invite titled "Welcome Chat (15 min)," and still not know where the printer is three months later. Both countries, it turns out, have found distinct and equally effective ways to leave you to figure it out yourself — one does it with warmth, the other with process.

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇭 Cambodia

🇨🇦 Canada

Cambodia's labour market is, structurally, built around informality: the International Labour Organization estimates that as much as 93 percent of employment in the country sits in the informal economy, which means most working people have never experienced a formal onboarding program in the first place, let alone delivered one to someone else. The World Bank's own diagnosis is blunter still — it notes that roughly 89 percent of Cambodian jobs remain low-skilled, prompting a five-year, $40-million "Skills for Better Jobs" initiative aimed at dragging the labour market toward anything resembling a structured training pipeline. Mentorship, where it exists, tends to be a byproduct of hierarchy and proximity rather than a formal HR deliverable: you learn by sitting near someone, watching what they do, and absorbing the unwritten rules of face and seniority that govern Khmer workplaces.

What this produces, in practice, is a culture where relationship-building is the onboarding process. New hires are folded into something closer to an extended family than a project team, invited to weddings and family meals within weeks, and expected to repay that inclusion with deference rather than initiative. It is warm, and it is also opaque: expectations are rarely written down, feedback is delivered obliquely to protect everyone's face, and a foreign hire can spend months mistaking social fluency for professional competence, or vice versa.

Canada sits at the opposite end of the formality spectrum without necessarily being more generous with actual guidance. According to Statistics Canada's Quality of Employment series, only about 29.7 percent of workers aged 25 to 64 took any job-related training in the twelve months to November 2024 — and that figure splits sharply by sector, with 40.3 percent of public-sector employees training compared to just 26.2 percent in the private sector, and by education, with bachelor's-degree holders training at more than double the rate of workers with a high school diploma or less. According to the OECD, Canadians worked an average of 1,685 hours in 2023, a modest number that belies how little of that time, relatively speaking, goes toward structured skill transfer once the welcome packet has been read. Canadian workplaces compensate with process: compliance modules, HRIS checklists, a buddy system that exists on paper. Whether a human being actually walks you through the unwritten rules is, per Statistics Canada's own data on who gets trained and who doesn't, substantially a function of your job title, your sector, and sometimes your background — Statistics Canada's figures show Filipino and South Asian workers training at notably lower rates than non-racialized colleagues in otherwise comparable jobs, a gap that tends to land hardest on exactly the newcomers who could use the most structured help.

None of this is unique to large firms or small ones, either. A small Cambodian NGO and a large Cambodian ministry both tend to onboard new staff the same relational way, because the informal economy's 93 percent sets the cultural default even for the formal sliver of the labour market. Canada shows the opposite pattern: a large bank will have an onboarding portal with modules and deadlines; a ten-person startup may hand you a laptop and a Slack invite and call it orientation. Scale changes the paperwork in Canada far more than it changes the underlying expectation that you will seek out what you need.

The two systems, set side by side, produce a tidy irony: Cambodia's onboarding is relational by necessity and informal by design, yet it often transmits the unwritten rules of the workplace faster than Canada's does, because those rules are inseparable from the relationship itself. Canada's onboarding is procedural by design, yet the procedure frequently stops exactly where the real learning begins — in the unscheduled, undocumented conversation with a manager who was never told to have it. Both countries will hand a new arrival a sense that something crucial happened just out of view; Cambodia hides it in the family dinner you weren't invited to yet, Canada hides it in the Slack thread you weren't CC'd on.

Even the cultural-data gap between the two countries is telling. Hofstede Insights has never published an individual dimension score for Cambodia, leaving one half of this comparison structurally undocumented — much like the onboarding itself. Canada's own published Hofstede score for individualism sits at 80, among the highest in the world, which tracks with a workplace that expects you to advocate for your own mentor, your own feedback, and your own development plan, rather than wait for someone to offer it. That one unscored half of the comparison is not a research oversight so much as a fitting metaphor: the data infrastructure that exists to describe Cambodia's workplace culture to outsiders is, like its onboarding, thinner than the lived reality underneath it, and anyone moving there for work should expect to build their own mental model from observation rather than from a dimension score on a slide.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

r/cambodia — a poster job-hunting in Phnom Penh is advised that Khmer-owned businesses run almost entirely on personal connections, while foreign-run shops care mainly about English fluency; the practical path in is through expat-owned small businesses and word of mouth, not applications.

Expat.com's Cambodia forum — a TESOL-qualified teacher from the US recounts being offered the same pay as unqualified colleagues and needing to hire a Khmer-speaking helper just to navigate basic errands, since no onboarding support was offered for life outside the classroom.

Move to Cambodia's expat Q&A — a development-sector worker describes her new job as joining "a second family," where colleagues' intense personal involvement feels intrusive at first, and where raising a disagreement publicly is read as a serious breach, since "nobody wants to see a workmate without a face."

Blind — a laid-off product manager who relocated from the US to Canada describes a job search gone cold within a year, with harsher competition and commenters warning about wage compression and the cost of living, a pattern that recurs often enough in relocation threads to count as a known risk rather than bad luck.

Canadian Occupational Safety magazine — a former banking officer from India describes being trained never to discuss his rights at his old job, which made a routine Canadian manager's question about vacation timing feel like a trap; a colleague separately notes that smiling and saying "yes" doesn't always mean a newcomer actually understood the instruction.

Conclusion

If you are choosing based on which country will teach you how to do your job, the honest answer is: neither will, not formally, and you should plan your first ninety days accordingly. In Cambodia, invest early in relationships — your onboarding is social before it is professional, and the organizational chart matters less than who eats lunch with whom. In Canada, invest early in asking — the system assumes you will request what you need, and declining to ask is read as self-sufficiency rather than humility, right up until it isn't.

The single difference that should actually move your decision is who bears the risk of the information gap. In Cambodia, that risk is softened by inclusion you didn't ask for; in Canada, it is softened by a process you have to activate yourself, and the two forms of softening suit very different temperaments. If you are the type who needs an explicit invitation before you'll impose on someone's time, Cambodia will do that inviting for you, repeatedly and sincerely, well before you've earned it on paper. If you are the type who would rather send five direct Slack messages than wait to be noticed, Canada's formal channels will reward you for using them loudly and often.

Pick the one that matches how you already operate, because you will not be retrained into the other; a naturally reserved person who moves to Canada expecting to be drawn out, or a direct, process-minded person who moves to Cambodia expecting a documented ramp-up plan, will both spend their first year fighting the system rather than learning from it. If a friend asked me over a drink, I'd say: in Cambodia, show up to the wedding; in Canada, show up to the 15-minute Welcome Chat with a list of direct questions — and in both places, assume the real onboarding happens in the conversation nobody scheduled.