Osaamisperusteinen rekrytointi -blogi: Strong demand, low confidence: what international professionals in Kuopio really need
Earlier this year, as part of my internship with the Competence-Based Recruitment Project, I designed and analysed a survey on Finnish language barriers and integration support needs among international professionals in the Kuopio region. The project is funded by the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) and run in collaboration with Talent Hub Eastern Finland and Savonia University of Applied Sciences. Its overall goal is to help people with international backgrounds access employment in Finland more effectively, by strengthening language skills and building connections between job seekers, students, employers, and local organisations.
The survey ran between February and March 2026, distributed both online and in person at locations where international professionals are likely to be, including the Työnavigaattori employment office on Asemakatu 7 in central Kuopio. We received 93 valid responses from job seekers, students, and employed individuals at different stages of their time in Finland. I want to be upfront about the sample size: 93 responses from one region is a starting point, not a representative study. The findings are not statistically universal. What they are is a clear signal, a peek into a situation that deserves more attention, more research, and more carefully designed support.
The confidence gap
72%of respondents feel “not confident at all” or only “slightly confident” speaking Finnish
The confidence numbers were low across the board, and what made it more striking is that they did not always track with language level. Plenty of people at intermediate Finnish (B1–B2) still rated their speaking confidence as low. Knowing a language in your head and actually using it out loud, with a real person, when something matters, those are two different things.
Figure: Self-reported confidence speaking Finnish
The most commonly cited challenge was understanding spoken Finnish, flagged by 63% of respondents, ahead of everyday conversations (59%) and work-related communication (48%). The Finnish you hear when two colleagues are talking across the office is not the same as what you practised in class. Speed, local expressions, sentences that trail off, that gap does not close by studying harder. You need to be in rooms where you can actually try, regularly, without too much at stake.
What people are actually asking for
96% of respondents said yes or maybe to taking part in structured support activities.
The demand is clearly there. The question is what shape that support should take.
Figure: Preferred activity types
Job search workshops and themed discussions were almost equally popular. But the open-text responses got more specific. People asked for networking with actual company staff, not information sessions about networking. Phonetics exercises and pronunciation practice came up repeatedly, the kind of focused work on how Finnish actually sounds that rarely shows up in standard language courses, but matters a lot when you are trying to sound natural, not just grammatically correct. A few suggested informal social outings: bowling, karaoke, or a visit to Puijo Tower, a well-known observation tower here in Kuopio. That might sound like a small thing, but it points to something real. Sometimes what people need is not another workshop. It is just a reason to be in a room with others and practise existing in this country a little more comfortably.
What the open-text responses revealed
Two open-text answers were hard to move past. The first:
“Finding a job that actually aligns with my skills instead of working for bare minimum and wasting my potential.”— Survey respondent, motivation question
This points to something beyond language. It is one response, not a statistically proven finding, but it signals a concern worth taking seriously: that for some people, the barrier is not just learning Finnish, it is that the support they receive does not account for who they actually are or what they are capable of. Another respondent asked to see “actual diversity in the organising teams and in the invited employers’ companies”, not just a programme that talks about inclusion, but one that visibly practises it. These are not things a language workshop can fix on its own, and they point to a need for deeper research beyond what this survey was designed to capture.
The second response reframed the whole problem:
“When you finally understand that the problem is occurring from the Finnish side and not from internationals. You literally described situations where Finns don’t cooperate with international people.”— Survey respondent, Finnish language challenges
Language integration is almost always framed as the newcomer’s responsibility: learn Finnish, take the test, adapt. This response points to the other side of that. But I want to be careful here, because the answer is not simply “Finnish people should speak more Finnish to internationals.” That is not straightforwardly helpful either, I can say from my own experience that when someone suddenly starts speaking Finnish to me without warning, I go blank. The issue is not exposure alone, it is the conditions around it.
Personally, I think what would help is more systematic: practice embedded into workplaces and study programmes rather than separate courses people have to seek out on their own. But that is my own reading of the situation, not a finding from this survey. The survey does not go deep enough on this to draw any conclusions, it is a thread worth pulling in future research that is specifically designed to look at it.
Why this felt personal
I should say that I did not come to this survey as a neutral outsider. My husband is a skilled graphic designer who spent over two years trying to find work in Finland that matched his background. He joined Finland’s government-funded integration programme, a scheme designed for immigrants that provides intensive Finnish language instruction, typically five days a week for up to a year, and the waiting list for that programme is already getting longer as more people arrive. He finally got a job as a graphic designer at the end of last year. I am still working part-time in a restaurant alongside my studies and working on intrenship projects, still learning Finnish through classes that have taught me the grammar but not yet the confidence to use it in a real conversation. I am, honestly, part of the 72%.
When I read the open-text responses about mismatched support, I thought of our own early experience. The TE office, Finland’s public employment service, where job seekers can go for guidance and support, was one of the first places my husband turned to when he was looking for work. He came home with a generic CV template that had nothing to do with a creative portfolio, and was once directed to an open interview session that turned out to be almost entirely for cleaning service positions, mostly for candidates who already spoke Finnish fluently. At that time we had been in Finland for maybe two months. That experience is mine, not something the survey respondents described. But when I read their responses about support that did not quite fit, or about feeling like the system was not built with them in mind, I recognised the feeling. The mismatch between the support on offer and what people actually needed was not malicious. It was just a gap. And gaps are exactly what this survey was trying to map.
What this is — and what it is not
93 responses from one region, collected over a few weeks, is a starting point. It is not a definitive picture of what every international professional in Finland needs, and I would not claim it is. What it does is point somewhere. The patterns are consistent enough, low confidence, high demand, a clear mismatch between the help available and the help people want, that they are worth taking seriously and worth investigating further, at a larger scale and with more depth.
The recommendations from the full report are practical and not complicated: evening and weekend sessions (64% prefer evenings, 43% weekends), weekly frequency, 52% said they want activities every week, not occasional one-offs, real employer connections, a focus on spoken Finnish and pronunciation, some informal social events alongside structured ones. None of it is radical. But if any of it shapes how the next programme is designed, then the 93 people who took the time to respond honestly will have made a difference. And that, more than anything, is what this internship was about.
By Ananna Das, Project Intern · Internship Reflection. Ananna has worked as an intern in the Competence-Based Recruitment project.
