Finland is always mentioned among the first places of quality of life and happiness rankings worldwide scoring for both 2018 and 2019 the first place when it comes to happiness and personal satisfaction index of its citizens (World Happiness Report published by the UN). What is the secret of the Scandinavian country? The taxation rate is high if compared to the rest of the other European Countries, but this translates into one of the best welfare systems in the World. Finnish education and healthcare systems are often considered as virtuous examples to follow and thanks to them the Nation managed to fill the gap with western Europe after World War II becoming one of the most attractive and competitive economies in the Old Continent.
Finnish economy recovered, although not brilliantly, after the 2008 financial world crisis and its GDP started growing again after 2016 and as of 2019, it kept growing at 1.7%.
Economic growth and stabilization of financial markets have also contributed to rebuilding a strong and solid job market especially, but not only, in financial and IT services.
So, if you are still wondering how to find an IT job in Finland, keep reading this article. As for the rest of Europe, obviously, there are different ways that expats willing to relocate to Finland use to look for jobs in the IT industry.
The first positive aspect to take into consideration is the current high demand of IT skilled professionals in Finland, especially in the southern regions and in the biggest centers such as Helsinki (the capital), Tampere, Turku and Espoo which have become in the past decade huge hotspots for R&D of High-Tech corporations, most of you may be familiar for example with Nokia, whose Headquarter is located in Espoo, not far from the capital.
How to start your research
Public and private investments in technologies and science are booming in the country and so is the demand for IT specialists such as web designers, programmers, informatics engineers, big data analysts and so on.
The search for an IT job in Finland can follow the traditional ways of international recruitment agencies (Adecco, Randstad, Manpower); socials like LinkedIn or sites like Monster and Indeed but with the Finnish reality, especially for foreigners who do not speak Finnish, it might be more useful to interact straight with employers or with local platforms such as ITJobs.AI, a new search engine for Jobs that focuses on Finnish market and that offers a lot of posting in English language.
The following are some of the most used and known job search engines in Finland: businessfinland.fi; te-palvelut.fi; tyopaikat.oikotie.fi; rekrytointi.com; valtiolle.fi. Beside I suggest to search for specific companies you might be interested working in, there are several big and medium enterprises in Finland with good and promising growth opportunities for young and talented expats with IT backgrounds; here is a list of the biggest ones: UPM, Stora Enso, Kone, Metso, Nestle, Nokia, Wärtsilä, ABB, Man, Valmet and many more; to the above-mentioned ones we must not forget all the consulting world which has landed in Finland in the past decade with surprising results and positive expectation for the near future. Big companies such as Accenture, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PWC have their offices located mostly in Helsinki and surroundings.
For these “big fishes” the best way remains to look for open positions on their sites and to get in contact directly with their recruitment teams; don’t be afraid of language barrier since in Finland when it comes to these big corporations English is widely used as working language and having a basic knowledge of Finnish is not required at all in most cases.
