Session Information
Contribution
Description: In my presentation I examine careers of highly educated immigrants in Finland. The amount of immigrants in Finland started to rise fast at the turn of the 1990's. At the same time the number of highly educated immigrants also increased. Today nearly one fifth of the immigrants in Finland have an academic degree. As previous studies (Jaakkola 2000; Forsander 2002; Haapakorpi 2004) reveal, despite of good education and long work experience, it is hard for highly educated immigrants in Finland to find work that they are qualified to do. Their situation in the labour market is often weak compared to the original population and also compared to the immigrants' earlier situation in their native countries. The unemployment rate is notably lower among Finnish people (9 % in 2004) than it is among immigrants (29 % in 2004) - even though it has been decreasing during the last ten years. It is not possible to find only one reason to explain immigrants' unsatisfactory situation in the Finnish labour market. There are many factors like place of origin, varying reasons for coming to Finland, language skills and education. However, it is a long process to reach a competency of labour market. The main purpose of this presentation is to describe what kind of careers highly educated immigrants' have in Finland. The research question is: What kind of work careers can be found among highly educated immigrants?
Methodology: The empirical data used in this study is based on inquiry, which was collected among highly educated immigrants in the autumn 2004 (n=95). These immigrants had taken an academic degree in their native countries. From their educational background, the largest occupational groups were doctors, teachers and engineers. The inquiry had questions about immigrants' university degree, work histories in Finland, periods of unemployment in Finland etc.
Conclusions: I examine immigrants' work histories paying attention to how immigrants' work in Finland has corresponded to their education. Based on this information highly educated immigrants can be divided into three main groups: careers that correspond the education, careers that partly correspond the education and careers that don't correspond the education at all. Each of the three main groups have been divided into two subgroups, so that the six different careers were discovered. Those careers are steady, transitory, temporary, downward career and careers of seekers and unemployed.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.