What’s next for improving internationals’ employment, entrepreneurship, and inclusion?

HIWE writing series on key results of the project: Part VI

Our research is now drawing to a close as the HIWE project officially ended on September 30, 2024. In this blog post, we discuss what happens next both for putting the policy recommendations into action and our research.

How to put our policy recommendations into practice?

We published our policy recommendations in our Open Forum event on 12.9.2024 (watch the live stream here). We invited stakeholders to roundtable discussion on what actions are needed to put our recommendations into practice. Here are key points of the stakeholders’ views.

Recommendation 1: Promote a comprehensive change in mindsets and policy regarding the importance of international talent in society.

One of our suggestions for making this change happen is develop a new long-term vision for skills-based immigration in Finland. The stakeholders too called for a parliamentary preparation of a vision that would carry across governmental periods. They also brought up the Roadmap for Education-based and Work-based Immigration 2035 as a policy document that is already a vision.

Recommendation 2: Ensure that services are easy to find, understand, use, and influence. Develop the service structure and practices of skilled migration to live up to this promise.

Stakeholders recognise that multiple actions are needed to make this change happen. More collaboration between and amongst ministries, service providers, authorities and so forth is needed since many everyday challenges faced by internationals cut across different agencies. Legislative changes are needed to fuel collaboration, since for example currently data protection limits collaboration opportunities. Engaging internationals to service and legislation development can be done by hiring full time multilingual internationals to public organizations. Whilst it is important that services are available in multiple languages, sometimes language is not enough: service providers should be trained about intercultural differences.

Recommendation 3: Develop existing skills-based immigration services to make the labour market more flexible and promote the position of highly skilled internationals in the market

Changes are needed to make Finland’s labour market more accessible. Whilst change is needed to issues that pose challenges for international talent, such as language requirements and local networks, changes are needed in employment, entrepreneurship, and employer services too.

The stakeholders recognise the important role of many actors in making this change happen: we all can try to make workplaces diverse and inclusive, universities need to be active in promoting entrepreneurship; internationals themselves need to be active; information needs to flow better between service providers, authorities, internationals, and other actors; service providers who need both agile ways to offer support as well as time, training, incentives for contacting businesses… They also see the importance of having consistency in how individuals and companies are served, such as having a person who “owns your case.” They also see the need to acknowledge that offering entrepreneurship support for internationals takes often longer and organisations need resources for that. The TE reform can be an opportunity, but in order to avoid problems for smaller municipalities, more collaboration between municipalities in providing services is needed.

How to Promote the Participation of Highly Skilled Internationals in Policy Making, Service Development, and Workplaces in Finland?

Recommendations:

• Public policymaking for integrating international talent into the Finnish working life should rely more heavily on collaboration between policymakers, internationals, and other stakeholders.
• Highly skilled internationals should be more engaged in designing and improving public and private services that focus on their employment and entrepreneurship opportunities.
• Workplace inclusivity and equal opportunities for all employees should be developed in collaboration with the employer, the work community, service providers, and other employers interested in promoting inclusivity.

The stakeholders see that in order to make these changes happen, existing structures and solutions need to be utilised, such as lobbying and using technology to lower the barriers of participation. Internationals could have more lobbying power if different organisations and assocations take joint action and through English speaking branches of parties. Civil society organisations can also do their bit to support internationals’ political participation. Widening the image of how decision-makers “look” is also needed.

In order for participation to have an effect and produce value for society and participants, “true” participation is needed where internationals and other actors can really have power over decision-making.

The stakeholders also called for more practical guidance on how to organise participatory activities. We have produced a checklist for preparing a public participation process.

How can you make a change?

We are researchers, so our biggest role has been to produce new understanding of how highly skilled internationals experience working and living in Finland and the policies that support them. Together with over 100 stakeholders, we’ve taken this knowledge and written policy recommendations for promoting the employment, entrepreneurship, and inclusion of internationals.

But policy recommendations are just that: recommendations. Their value is realised only when people take them up and turn them into actual policies and actions.

We encourage policy- and decision-makers, service providers, third sector organisations, companies, internationals, fellow researchers, and any other interested stakeholders to engage with our recommendations and find ways to make a change happen.

HIWE is ending, what’s next?

For the past two years, we’ve studied the how highly skilled internationals experience the Finnish labour market, working life, the possibilities of entrepreneurship, and generally living and coping in Finnish society. We’ve also studied how local and national ecosystems supporting internationals’ work, innovation activity and entrepreneurship and current policies respond – or not – to the needs of skilled internationals. We’ve used this knowledge about current challenges to co-creation solutions with different stakeholders.

Our final product was publishing two sets of policy recommendations: the first focusing on promoting the employment and entrepreneurship of highly skilled internationals and the second on promoting the inclusion of internationals in policy making, service development, and workplaces. We’ve also laid out roadmaps for action, suggesting alternatives for putting the recommendations into action.

We researchers are grateful for Business Finland funding our research. We also give an enormous thank you to all the hundreds of people who have collaborated with us. This project has truly been a result of co-creation!

We hope that our results will continue to have an impact on Finland in the upcoming years.

The project is ending, but work on this topic is not. We have collected such an interesting data set from this project and will continue to analyse it and publish academic research out of it. We will update our future publication on our website too.

Our researchers are also looking for opportunities to continue doing research on this topic, so stay tuned for future initiatives!

Author: Piritta Parkkari (University of Eastern Finland)