Riveria halts bilingual courses as North Karelia jobs dry up

Riveria, a vocational college in North Karelia, has suspended its bilingual training programmes for immigrants because the region’s high unemployment means there are not enough jobs for all graduates, Yle reports.

The programmes, launched between 2023 and 2025, allowed students to begin their studies in English but required them to complete their qualifications in Finnish. The aim was to train immigrants for sectors facing labour shortages.

The first students are now graduating into a sharply weaker labour market. North Karelia’s unemployment rate was above 16 per cent in July, while the number of publicly advertised vacancies has fallen sharply over the past two years.

At the start of the bakery and confectionery programme in Nurmes, there were 14 students. Only five are due to graduate.

Nom Grace Ibe, who moved from Nigeria to Nurmes in early 2024, will qualify as a baker and confectioner in September. She has already found work at a local bakery, where she bakes sweet buns and Karelian pastries, packs pastries, slices bread and works in dispatch.

“Work has been really great. Everyone has been friendly and ready to advise me if I have had questions,” Ibe said.

She has learned Finnish professional vocabulary, although longer conversations in Finnish remain challenging.

“I am doing everything I can to learn Finnish. Language is part of culture, and I want to become part of Finnish culture,” Ibe said.

Vocational teacher Laura Marttila said the bilingual model had worked well despite some misunderstandings. However, most of the students who dropped out had done so for family reasons. Several had children who remained in their home countries.

Labour shortages remain in some sectors

Although the labour market is difficult, North Karelia still has shortages in some fields. Riikka Vartiainen, director of the North Karelia employment area, said the region needed skilled workers in the engineering and metal industries, including welders and machinists.

Riveria had also introduced bilingual qualification programmes in the restaurant, social and healthcare, property services and food industries.

There is still a labour shortage in social and healthcare services, but it is concentrated among highly educated professionals such as doctors, psychologists and social workers. At the same time, wellbeing services counties have held change negotiations that have resulted in redundancies, and there is now a supply of practical nurses, nurses and social service professionals, Vartiainen said.

Vartiainen said employers were still reluctant to hire applicants who did not speak perfect Finnish. She added that international workers would be needed in the future as the native population ages and declines.

Tuition fees deter international applicants

Riveria is now assessing carefully what kinds of international training are needed. Principal Esa Karvinen previously told Yle that the college was planning entirely new English-language qualification programmes in the coming years.

It remains uncertain how many applicants those programmes will attract. Tuition fees introduced in August have deterred international applicants from both upper secondary schools and vocational colleges.