This corner, I want to ask a question. If you were to guess, what percentage of our university technology graduates would you say are international?
During Autumn, I spent some time asking this from both friends and colleagues, and from the vast amount of data available in Finland. Two facts were quickly very clear; Finland should be using its data a lot more than it does, and those who haven’t spent time in universities recently really don’t know what is happening in them.
The percentage of engineering, technology and ICT graduates who are non-Finnish, according to the official statistics, is 25 %. One in four of the new entries into the Finnish workforce is international, almost all having spent only two years in Finland. On top of that, around 60 % of our new doctoral workers are international, and there are those who are moving here later in life for work or family, who made up over 50 % of the respondents in our Survey for International Experts.
With such a high international graduate percentage, we could expect that there have been vast changes in the technology industry. Indeed, in some cases, this shift to multilingual, multicultural workplaces has been seen. Unfortunately, that 25 % is not the full picture. From those graduating from technology and ICT in 2021, over one third had left Finland within one year. In addition, by that point, only 40 % had found a job in Finland that could be considered suitable in skill level for their degree.
As an international graduate from chemical engineering, I will phrase it another way. If international graduates are the product of our university process, 40 % is a yield that is not sustainable. If we don’t improve it, we are going bankrupt.
There is no single simple correct answer on how to do this, but possibilities come when we utilise data. TEK’s Graduate Survey for example allows us to see the importance of the master’s thesis. We can see that a thesis in the private sector increases the chance of an employment relationship at graduation by two to four times for an international student. This allows us to target that goal and to showcase to companies an effective step they can take.
The data is also not just doom and gloom. The rates of suitable employment, and the rate of remaining in Finland, has increased continuously since 2016 for international graduates. Our industry, and our country, has been moving in the right direction. If we are to continue doing so, we must use more data in our decision-making.
