Recruitment

1. Punctuality and reliability — Always be on time, or 5-10 minutes early. If you know that you will be late, inform as soon as possible. This extends to following schedules and agreements such as work shifts, meetings, assignments, or project deadlines. You are expected to do your agreed tasks by a given time, and if you're not able to, ask for help or inform of delays within a reasonable time.

2. Professional skills — Finland is considered the best place for skills development in Europe, but it is also the main area where foreigners are at a disadvantage. In Finland, you are expected to continuously and simultaneously develop your professional skills and education. Workplaces will provide essential learning to support work skills, but a lot of the professional growth within the workforce comes from people being active about expanding their knowledge area, continuing their education, learning new skills, and seeking better opportunities. Education at every level goes hand-in-hand with practical experience, and many students are expected to also work during their studies.

3. Language — Finnish and Swedish are the two official languages in Finland. As with many other countries, you can get by in English, but professionally it's only viable in a small selection of fields. You are expected to have at least basic proficiency in Finnish if you want to live and work in Finland. A lot of foreigners decide to learn Swedish instead because it's easier, however even though Swedish is an official language, the vast majority of the country speaks Finnish.

4. Summer planning begins in January — Summer jobs are the easiest way to get an entry-level position, or try different professional fields, before committing to a career path. What most people don't expect is that the summer job positions fill up already in January-February, March at the latest. This is due to the typical Finnish summer vacation being 3-4 weeks. A lot of the planning is done as soon as work resumes in the new year.

Below you will find a selection of search engines for finding work in Finland. They are by no means all the jobs available, but will give you a good start.

Please note that a lot of them are in Finnish only. You can use Google Chrome's page translation to help you out, however we recommend that you try to learn basic terminology, and that you have your application materials available also in Finnish.

For more work opportunities, you can check the individual web pages of companies, universities and organizations. International search engines, such as LinkedIn and Facebook are also viable options.

If you struggle to find work through job listings, keep in mind that majority of positions are in fact "unlisted", meaning they get filled internally, through referral or headhunting. The only way to gain access to those is through networking, so please check out our next lesson.