The European Social Fund Plus is financing a new mentoring project, JobBuddies, at Föreningen Luckan in Helsinki. The aim is to promote employment and foster Swedish-language integration of immigrants in Finland. JobBuddies is a pilot project that will last until January 2027, with the first mentoring groups expected to start in January 2025.
Luckan Integration has started a new project called JobBuddies. The aim of JobBuddies is to increase employment among immigrants, with a focus on Swedish as an integration language. This goal is achieved through an innovative concept: group mentoring. The work is based on sector-specific groups of 10-12 immigrants being supervised by three mentors established in Finnish business life for six months at a time. The mentees are people who are either active job seekers or people who work in other jobs but are trained in the same sector as the mentors.
This model is designed to reduce the gap between the skills that migrants have and the needs of the labour market. It also aims to promote networking in the Finnish job market, which is often lacking among immigrants. By bringing together mentors with specific sectoral knowledge, mentees can receive more targeted and detailed guidance, increasing their insights into labour market requirements and opportunities. This focused approach helps mentees to better understand industry expectations and to build networks and potential career paths.
The ESF+ funded project started in August 2024 with a staff of two project advisors and is planned to run until January 2027, with at least two mentoring groups per semester in 2025 and 2026. For the rest of the autumn of 2024, the project team will complete the project website and other presentation materials, as well as develop other structural tools needed during the project. At the same time, the group will immediately start looking for and recruiting suitable mentors and mentees. The goal for this year is to have two JobBuddies groups, tentatively in the IT and healthcare sectors, ready to start just after the end of the year. In addition to the European Social Fund Plus, Luckan has also received funding from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, the foundation Sparbanksstiftelsen Esbo-Grankulla, and the Finnish-Swedish Chamber of Commerce.