CulDif – Cultural and linguistic differences in labour market

1. The common challenge of the programme area we are jointly tackling in our project it to improve
the occupancy in the labour market of youngsters who has different cultural and/or linguistic
background.
2. The overall objective of the project and the expected change our project will make to the current
situation.
The expected change concerns the the statistic as the unemployment rate in Estonia of young nonestonians
is approximately 30% bigger comparing to young Estonians. /www.stat.ee/
Period: 2009-2021, focus-group: 18-24 years old youngsters.
Finland’s youth foreign-born population exhibits a lower employment rate than native-born Finns.
According to Finnish stats, in 2022 the unemployment rate for foreign-born youth in Finland is 23.2%,
while the unemployment rate for native-born youth is 14.47%. /www.stat.fi/ This suggests that
foreign-born youth face greater challenges in finding employment, likely due to language barriers and
other cultural factors.
3. The main outputs we will produce and those who will benefit from them are:
– to improve the competiveness inside our target-group (10 young people from EST + 10 from FIN) –
participants should have found the preferred occupancy (includes entrepreneurship) in labour market
for the end of period i.e. after 18 months
– be improved and tested educational program and materials for meeting the wider auditorium (the
other centers of learning) after the end of current program
4. Our approach and the reasons for taking a cross-border approach are as follows:
– self-mapping
– involving practitioners
– methods that support self-driven studies and researches
– networking
For all those approaches the cross-border dimension is enriching, but specially for the last one. With
cross-border network our target-group can get:
– the necessary confidence by finding out the people with similar potential and problems
– unique contacts and clear ideas how to use those contacts to meet their (and current program)
targets i.e. improve their competiveness in labour market
5. What is new/original about the project:
The target-group combined with the goal is rather original. The big narrative in educational level today
is the ’melting pot’ to get the results by mixing different cultures together. This is definitely most
right way to do it and we definitely won’t oppose to this, but complement this approach. By positive
attitude and respect to their heritage we will give them confidence, tools and contacts how to turn
their current disadvantages into advantages.