Engineer girlfriend moving to Finland - No luck with jobs!

[interleukin]

being a citizen is not relevant to state-sponsored Finnish language classes, this has changed now.

I know, and officially this was the case also for us. Practically, however, there is a big risk that the Finnish citizen gets passed over if hän knows just a bit of Finnish and there are hundreds of absolutely helpless non-EU citizens waiting in line for those precious courses (as in the Helsinki area). It's not a rule, just a decision that an administrator might make.

[Upphew]

when the average egineer's salary in Finland 5500€

Wait wait wait. You talked about your GF lowering her standards. Is that where he standards were? Because I can assure you that your information is very inaccurate. Hehehehe... 5500

Noooooooooo, not at all. To be specific, this number was mentioned by my Finnish teacher in Aalto University. More specifically she said that the average wage is 3500 in Finland and the average engineer's wage is 5500. She might even meant gross income which is quite a difference. But even if it holds, for sure the distribution is not symmetrical, I mean some guy might get 15000 but there's none getting -10000...

Asking too little isn't good either. http://www.uil.fi/portal/page?_pageid=1 ... ema=PORTAL

[Upphew]

As about the fact that they're choosing mainly Finnish people and Finnish speakers I wouldn't consider it racism at all. It is indeed sad but companies set the rules and I only choose if I want to "play".

Foreign diplomas, even with this Bologna stuff, can be unknown to employers. Who would you hire: a newly minted engineer that you went decade or two ago or someone from country whose education system you don't know? Bonus points for being the first one hiring after graduation, so no "if s/he was good enough for then, s/he is good enough for us..."

A lot depends if company has experience with foreign employees. No experience or bad experience... good luck for next applicant.

[rinso]

It is a fact that discrimination is the method used for selecting people for interview;

No it's selecting on quality/need. Finnish + English in a Finnish company is more useful than Greek + English.

3. Indeed her surname is a pretty long and weird Greek name :p

Marrying could at least solve that problem. (but it won't help as long as her Finnish is below par)

[interleukin]

We ended up moving from Finland to another EU country...

I guess it was easier in your case to move to Sweden. I assume you are swedish? and your finnish spouse already had swedish language skills under his belt, as its compulsory to learn the language here.

Getting a bit off topic now, sorry OP. No, I´m not Swedish, I´m from Iceland, another nordic country with bad economy But yeah, Swedish is massively easier than Finnish which means more options.

[Pursuivant]

The main problem is that "just graduated, no experience". The economy slump means if they got an engineer for 1500 a month it would be his father with the experience under his belt. I agree - look in the UK, don't matter where, as long as its a job. Then with experience.... You don't expect to find a job as PhD do you

[browndude]

Given her current qualifications, under the current economic circumstances in Finland, the chances of her finding a job as an average engineer are essentially zero. I personally know numerous highly qualified and experienced Finnish people who are also applying for the same types of jobs that she is applying for and it is guaranteed that they will get picked first because they will be a much better and easier fit for a Finnish company. Currently, the job possibilities that might open up for a fresh off the boat foreigner are the ones that require highly specialized skills (i.e. world-class experts in some very specialized fields of research etc..). If she is really, really interested in moving to Finland and she really want to be active, one thing she can do is to challenge herself to become fluent in Finnish (and perhaps Swedish) over the course of a year or two. This will open up many more possibilities in Finland that would have otherwise remained closed. I myself am now close to C1 level and my current work-which is not a permanent job by any means- involves reading, listening to and to a lesser extent writing in very grammatically correct Finnish. I would not have been able to even find this if I had been just another foreigner who barely spoke Finnish. Also, a Finnish employer might also be inclined to look upon you very favorably if you are a foreigner who speaks almost fluent Finnish because this would show that you are not afraid of facing a difficult challenge. These are very challenging times economically so one needs to work very hard to stay afloat, that is a fact.

[onkko]

Where i start....

Wanting finnish in finland is as far of racism.... Are you an idiot when you claim thats racist? I would of course like to be served in X language in finland.... Sure.... I can come to serve you and talk gibberish, if you dont understand you are racist...

Anything where full able trained people have upper hand is -ism. We should hire obese paraplegic people in our fire stations to not to be -phobic....

You arent able to do your work, regardless of race, is not racism.