When mentors and mentees from Sammen om en jobb met with Storting President Masud Gharahkhan this summer, the conversation quickly turned to what we can do to help highly educated immigrants enter the workforce at relevant job. Here you can read about our key insights and the reason why Sammen om en jobb focuses primarily on immigrants with higher education.
Highly educated immigrants are falling through the cracks
Before we look at solutions, it is important that we understand the barriers that keep highly qualified people out of the workforce.
Language: In highly skilled jobs, language requirements are very high, often including English as well.
Networking: 60–70% of all job openings are never advertised. As a newcomer to Norway, you don’t have a network or know where or how to build one.
Knowledge of the job market: Where can an engineer work in Norway? What is the process for getting a permanent teaching position? These are examples of questions that are difficult to answer when entering a new and unfamiliar professional environment.
Work culture and informal workplace norms: Showing that you “fit in” is one of the most important aspects of the hiring process and requires a deep understanding of the culture and informal norms.
Qualifications are not recognized: Work experience gained abroad is often not recognized as equally relevant, even when it has been fully approved by the Norwegian Agency for the Evaluation of International Education (NOKUT).
Skepticism and Perceived Risk: It often feels safer to hire people who are similar to oneself. Some employers worry that employees from a different culture will take longer to adapt—or may never fully integrate into the workplace and get the hang of their job duties.
The obstacles mentioned above are particularly challenging for immigrants seeking employment in jobs that require higher education. At the same time, they are difficult to address through courses and initiatives organized by the government
Public services are insufficient
The public sector is struggling to provide good opportunities for highly educated immigrants for several reasons:
Little Focus on Relevant Jobs : Highly educated individuals have an advantage over less-educated immigrants in the job market and find it easier to secure unskilled jobs, but this is often counterproductive. We must help this group move into relevant jobs in order to make the most of their skills and free up unskilled jobs for those without a higher education.
Underprioritized group: Since highly educated immigrants are viewed as having greater resources, the expectation is that they will be able to fend for themselves. This overlooks the specific challenges associated with jobs requiring higher education, as mentioned above, and results in approximately 73,000 immigrants being unable to utilize their skills (SSB, 2022).
The NAV system is tailored to a lower level: The NAV system is generally designed for those who are far removed from the workforce, and highly educated immigrants are often placed in courses and programs at a level that is far too low.
Difficult to Provide Subject-Specific Assistance: Counselors at NAV or other program providers lack the specialized expertise to provide subject-specific assistance to an engineer one moment, an economist the next, and then a professor of literary history.
The stigma of coming from “NAV”: It is not always an advantage for participants to be introduced to the Norwegian workforce through a NAV program. The “NAV label” often leads to them being viewed as the company’s “charity project” rather than a talented resource.
A personal mentor complements the public system
We have found that having a volunteer mentor from the same industry is the single most important measure for supporting highly educated immigrants in the workplace. Success factors in such a mentoring relationship include:
One-on-one support: Personalized support from a mentor in the same field ensures that the job search process is tailored to the participant’s needs in a way that courses and other forms of guidance cannot.
Volunteer Efforts: The fact that mentors are volunteers helps foster professional, personal relationships that often continue beyond the formal program period. The volunteer efforts also make the program highly cost-effective.
Networks and Trust: The mentor is often the job seeker’s first professional contact in Norway, while for many mentors, their mentee is their first encounter with a foreign job seeker. This is how we break down barriers and build both networks and trust.
Half Find Jobs: Approximately 32% of the participants in the mentoring program find jobs within 6 months, and 50% within a year. 64% of them believe their mentor played an important or crucial role.
The Solution and the Way Forward
So, which lessons and experiences from the mentoring program are relevant to the integration debate as a whole? Here are our key points:
relevant job: We must stop being content with simply getting people into jobs, but instead challenge ourselves to get people into relevant jobs . This means making highly educated immigrants a priority group.
Everyone should be assigned a mentor: Everyone who comes to Norway from another country should be offered the opportunity to be paired with a volunteer mentor.
Socioeconomic benefits: If all immigrants with higher education were assigned a personal mentor, we could potentially cut the number of those without relevant job in half and save Norway 2.5–3 billion kroner annually.
It can be done!: We have the experience, the technology, and the volunteer commitment needed to make this happen. All that’s left now is a comprehensive national effort.
Would you like to help foster a diverse and forward-looking workplace? Sign up to be a mentor with us, or get your company involved!
References
SSB (2022). How many immigrants are overqualified? Available at: www.ssb.no/arbeid-og-lonn/sysselsetting/artikler/hvor-mange-innvandrere-er-overkvalifisert