The Finnish labour market: internationalisation and future challenges : The role of local universities of applied sciences in improving foreign students’ employability in small and medium-sized companies of Päijät-Häme and Kanta-Häme

The research is carried out in cooperation with Häme Chamber of Commerce and contributes to the development of LAMK project OSSI 2. The study investigates the business conditions of Päijät-Häme and Kanta-Häme regions, comparing them to the Finnish context. The thesis has the objective of identifying the internationalisation level of the companies in Häme and examining whether these companies are prepared to hire a foreign workforce. The challenge for international graduates is finding employment. Public institutions can help businesses and international graduates in meeting each other’s needs. The study is divided into theoretical and empirical parts. The first part starts with a description of the economic conditions of Finland and the future challenges because of reduced birth rates, labour shortages, migration and unemployment. The theoretical part ends with a study on the role of local universities of applied sciences, LAMK and HAMK, in the regional development, and their relationship with local businesses. The empirical part strives to understand the perspective from the businesses’ point of view. The data is gathered through a questionnaire delivered to the member companies of Häme Chamber of Commerce. The data used are mostly secondary sources, gathered from Finnish and European governmental institutions, Statistics Finland, and previous studies. Primary sources are collected for the empirical part. The research methods are qualitative and quantitative. The analysis of the results is carried with the Chi-square test of independency. The study results show that enterprises founded after the 80’s are more internationalised and employ a diverse workforce. The difficulties of local SMEs in attracting a diverse workforce is also having negative effects on the regional migration. The solutions are incentivizing highly skilled migration on the short period of time and improving internationalisation and export industry in the long term