Relato y análisis de la sesión individual con Sara (4-4-2016)

Based on the interviewees’ responses, the Finnish working culture is characterised by straightforward- ness, openness, lack of supervision, trust and flexibility, but foreign employees might be used to a differ- ent kind of working environment. Below are examples of some challenges that arise around the issues of giving and getting feedback, being proactive and perceptions of trust:

“We are open and honest people here, pretty straightforward. It’s just a Finnish way of being and also the small company culture. But sometimes, I am afraid we may not have understood different ex- pectations from different cultures so well. One example was with Asian employees, giving or getting feedback is different for them…and it was a bit of a struggle for the line manager.” (e1)

“For the international students who had no previous experience of working in Finland, to get them on the board of Finnish way of working, might be a challenge. They might expect much more bureau- cratic leadership than Finns. Sometimes they don’t get that we really expect proactive and intuitive approach from them, they are too much waiting for guidance, and shut their mouth when they are asked about their opinions” (e5)

“I would say that in Finland we trust our employees a lot, but not everybody treats that trust as a ben- efit. Not necessarily even with bad intentions, they consider that flexibility. And there is flexibility but only if you act within the limits of trusts” (e6)

Another challenge is related to language issues. It turns out that, even in companies where the official language of communication is English, the higher management might be reluctant to hire employees who do not speak Finnish:

“…if you hire the foreigner who doesn’t speak Finnish, this will make the work in whole team more complicated. Because they have to change the language for one person. That is something really preventing the manager to hire, because they have to think how much extra work we have to do because of one person.” (e8)

Finally, the size of the company matters when deciding on whether to hire international employees:

“Smaller companies are usually not willing to hire foreigners as compared to the large companies because they don’t have the resources to support foreigners in the beginning” (e8)

Smaller companies may also require more versatile skills from their employees:

“In a smaller or middle size company, we require people to take larger responsibilities. If you are go- ing to work in some big company, there are always some colleagues, tools, and functions that give you the frame, so your tasks are manageable, and you can focus on what you are doing. But for small company, we need people are easy to take some new tasks, we require people to understand some business, even some engineers should have such basic skills” (e1).

Chapter 7.

Discussion

The aim of this chapter is to discuss how the findings from the quantitative and qualitative parts of the study support or are in conflict with each other and the findings of other studies. The following topics are highlighted here: 1) post-graduation mobility, 2) the differences in the perception of skills required at work between graduates and employers, 3) factors leading to employment, 4) the disciplinary back- ground and employment, 5) the relevance of Finnish higher education to the world of work, 6) job search methods and 7) job satisfaction.

Post-graduation mobility

The topic of how many international students stay in Finland after they graduate has been quite im- portant in this study, along with the employment rate. The news is good here: 78% of graduates stayed in Finland for one-two years after graduation. Only two of the interviewees found that Finland was not attractive enough. The answers to the open-ended questions of the survey suggest that even more gradu- ates would stay in the country if they had more job opportunities.

A special study entitled “Mobile Talent” has been conducted in five European countries, namely Germany, France, the Netherlands, the UK and Sweden, on the staying rates and reasons to stay in the host country (Sykes & Chaoimh, 2012). The study results show that those who are interested in staying “tend to be younger; they also often have prior work experience in the country of study and are less likely to have children. Respondents from countries in Asia (e.g. China, India, Iran and Sri Lanka) and Eastern Europe (e.g. Ukraine and Serbia) are generally keener to stay on than those from North America, Latin America and Africa”. The results from the VALOA study can be compared to these only in terms of the continent of origin. There is a slight difference between the results in that those who came from African countries are rather eager to stay in Finland.

However, we should also bear in mind that 50% of the respondents spent more than half a year in Finland before starting their studies, which means that they may have other reasons to move to this country than study, e.g. family ties. In this case, we can concur with the International Student Barometer results (CIMO, 2011a) in that Finland is chosen by foreign talent rather as an attractive place to live to begin with. To sum up, there is a need to investigate international students’ post-graduation plans along with the reasons for staying or leaving in future research.