Supporting Immigrants’ Employability? Experiences in Digital Pedagogy Applied with Immigrant Learners in Turku in Southwest Finland

Abstract

Abstract Labor shortages and labor mismatches are common emergent problems in Finland, ones which will occur on a much broader scale in the future in an aging society. Immigrants constitute an important pool of labor, but sometimes it is difficult for them to find even a first job in local labor markets. Studies have shown that mastering the language of the host country is a crucial factor in the success of immigrants’ employment. The AboaNova development project in Turku, Southwest Finland, funded by the European Social Fund, aimed to promote two-way integration by developing new methods and pedagogical tools to speed up employment and support the linguistic skills of immigrants in the Finnish language. As one example, the project applied interactive digital pedagogy and learning analytics to support both language learning and guidance for on-the-job learning to enter the labor market. However, the challenge in implementing new tools often has to do with resistance and suspicious attitudes encountered at different organizational levels during development projects.