Can you work in Finland without Finnish? 2,355 ads

In 2022 a researcher at Aalto University School of Business sat down with 2,355 entry-level vacancies advertised to students and coded every one of them for what it asked of an applicant’s languages. 705 of them were written in English. The other 1,650 were in Finnish.¹

Seven in ten, before anybody gets to a requirement. That is the first answer, and it is about the door rather than the job: most positions are simply not advertised in a language you can read.

The answer splits by sector, not by level

Among the 705 English-language ads, the requirement was distributed like this: English only 34.5 per cent, nothing specified 20.1 per cent, English and Finnish 27.0 per cent, English with Finnish as an advantage 10.2 per cent, Swedish wanted 4.5 per cent, another European language 3.7 per cent.¹

Group the first two together, since an English-language advert that names no language requirement is asking for English, and 54.5 per cent of them need no Finnish at all.

Then split the same set by what the job is, and the average stops being useful.

Over 66 per cent of technology postings land in the two English-is-enough rows. In business, nearly half of the postings state a requirement or an expectation of professional Finnish. Design has 42 ads in it, which is too few to lean on, and the author says so.

The same data cut by employer type says something a job seeker can act on faster than any of this. Start-ups posted in English and in Finnish in roughly equal numbers. Small and medium companies did not: they account for just over half of all the Finnish-language postings. Public institutions and charities posted 15.2 per cent of the Finnish ads and 7.3 per cent of the English ones.¹

What “fluent Finnish” in an advert is asking for

This is the phrase the question usually hides behind, and the study is useful on it because it read the wording rather than the checkbox.

Where an advert named Finnish as a working language it almost always came wrapped in the same vocabulary: sujuva, fluent; professional; native level; good knowledge and communication skills. The author’s reading is that these expect full command or at least comfortable everyday conversation, not an intermediate level.¹

The useful distinction is not between ads that mention Finnish and ads that do not. It is this:

1. 1
   No language named at all

   In an English-language advert this is the most open category there is. One in five of the English postings said nothing about language, and the author reads the silence as English being sufficient.
2. 2
   Finnish is considered an advantage

   Formally, Finnish is not required. In practice the study notes that an employer writing this with a strong tone of voice may still lean toward a Finnish speaker. This is the row where asking is worth more than guessing.
3. 3
   Sujuva suomen kielen taito

   Fluent Finnish, and the surrounding words are the tell. Next to professional or native level it is a screening criterion. Next to a job description whose actual tasks are in English it may be habit, which is a different thing and occasionally negotiable.

The reason that third row is worth arguing with is that the people who do this professionally argue with it. Language specialists working on recruitment describe employers routinely demanding fluent or excellent Finnish for roles the work itself would not require it for, and a 2024 pilot run by Kielibuusti with the City of Espoo and OP Uusimaa did the reverse: it defined the language the role genuinely needed before advertising it, and hired four multilingual customer advisers who stayed on permanent contracts.²

The employers’ side, which is less about you than it looks

Two surveys the thesis draws on set the frame. A 2020 ELY-keskus survey of 1,009 recruiters found that fewer than a quarter of companies were willing to hire a candidate without fluent Finnish, and that half of recruiters saw Finnish fluency as a key factor in succeeding at the work. A 2021 survey of 500 organisations commissioned by Barona found Finnish as the official working language in 96 per cent of them, English in about 40 per cent and Swedish in 15 per cent, with more than half naming language as a big challenge in using international labour.¹

The obstacle those numbers describe is not always the applicant’s Finnish. Finnish employers have told a surveyor as much: the biggest barrier they named to hiring internationally was their own language skills, not the applicants’.³ An organisation that has never run a meeting in English is not evaluating your Finnish. It is evaluating its own capacity to change, and reaching for the requirement that makes the question go away.

That is also why the picture moves. The Finnish Institute of Occupational Health’s guidance to international professionals leads with the same point and then gives the practical instruction: if a role suits your competence but not the stated language level, contact the employer, describe what you can do, and ask whether the job could work with the Finnish you have.⁴

The half the graduate data does not see

One caution about everything above: it is a study of entry-level vacancies advertised to students at one university, so it describes the graduate end of the market and nothing else.

The state’s own guidance describes a wider picture and names the sectors. InfoFinland, run by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, says plainly that the need for Finnish depends on the sector, that many immigrants work in cleaning, construction, restaurants and transport while still working on the language, and that IT, industry and international companies have plenty of jobs where English is enough.⁵

At the other end of the same page is the hardest line in the whole subject. Some professions are regulated, and there the requirement is legal rather than cultural: to teach in pre-primary, primary or lower secondary education you need excellent spoken and written skills in the school’s language of instruction, which InfoFinland maps to CEFR level C. No amount of sector-picking gets around that one, and it is demonstrated with a certificate rather than argued about in an interview.

The market therefore has three parts and not two: roles where English is the working language, roles where Finnish is a habit that can be questioned, and roles where a C-level certificate is the entry condition. Only the middle one is negotiable.

What to do with this

Three things follow from the numbers rather than from encouragement.

Read the language of the advert before the requirements. Seven in ten postings in the study were in Finnish, so the filter that removes most jobs operates before any requirement is stated. Searching in Finnish, even badly, changes the size of the pool more than any other single move.

Weight sector and employer size above your own level. A technology role at a start-up and an administrative role at a municipality are not the same labour market, and no amount of B1 moves you between them.

Treat the advantage row as a question, not a verdict. It is the only row in the data where the employer has explicitly left the decision open, and it is where the recruitment specialists say the real conversation about what the job needs can happen.

And one more, which the rest of the job search will teach you anyway: the language an employer hired you in and the language the room runs in are different questions. A workplace can advertise in English, interview in English, and still do its actual talking in Finnish at eleven o’clock. Nearly 70 per cent of Finns say they are willing to help somebody with the language.⁶ Almost nobody gets asked.

Check the figures above against a current source before making a decision on them. The core study is from 2022 and the surveys it cites are from 2020 and 2021, which is old enough for a labour market to have moved under them.