Many face ethical issues at work

In autumn 2020, we conducted a survey to examine the ethical challenges in tech that our members experience at work. Ethical issues are quite common; more than half of the survey respondents reported having faced ethical challenges during their career. The ethical questions faced by tech professionals today are related to the operations of the organisation, such as mistreatment or problems with the job application process, and roughly just as often to the tech job itself, such as conflicts of interests, the attributes of a specific product or agreements. Ethical challenges created by new technological solutions, which have sparked public debate, such as the design choices of autonomous vehicles or artificial intelligence, did not come up in the study. The results of the study will be published once the analysis is complete.

TEK offers support with ethical issues 

We support our members as they deal with various ethical issues. Contact us and we will help you address the issue. Our lawyers are at your service if you have any problems with the termination of employment or other situations related to your employment relationship.

We also facilitate our members’ ability to address ethical questions, for example by constantly developing university education in technology so that it would better equip students to address ethical questions. We are currently advocating the incorporation of sustainable development skills, in particular, into tech curricula. In addition, we have gathered the key ethical guidelines in tech in TEK’s Code of Honour, which we give to each graduate in the field of technology.

More information about ethics

Over the years, we have produced an abundance of learning materials and other content about the ethics of tech. You can learn more e.g. from the technology ethics textbook written by Doctor of Theology and Philosophy Topi Heikkerö, which is still relevant today, and the case examples of technology ethics. These materials are available only in Finnish.