Metropolia to establish a centre for the assessment and demonstration of asylum seekers' competence

08.02.2016

Metropolia plans to establish a centre for the demonstration and recognition of asylum seekers' and immigrants' professional competence. The centre will assess the needs of asylum seekers and immigrants for supplementary training, as well as promote their integration into Finnish society and speed up their access to the labour market.

The centre will provide service as a one-stop desk particularly for refugee centres in southern Finland and the asylum seekers living in them, as well as immigrants who have received a residence permit. The centre will identify immigrants' competences and instruct them to either look for work or find supplementary training. The need for a competence demonstration centre is acute particularly in the Helsinki Metropolitan area, where there are large numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers and the best employment opportunities. “Metropolia aims to address the challenges faced by our society by providing solutions that utilise the strengths of UASs. That is why we made the initiative for establishing a competence demonstration centre. I believe that we will be able to find quick and positive operating models that will benefit our entire country,” says Riitta Konkola, Managing Director, President of Metropolia.

Competence demonstration centre to initially focus on technology

The competence demonstration centre's operations will initially be mostly linked to the studies of technology. This is because currently the majority of asylum seekers are men aged 20 to 29 years, many of whom possess training and work experience in the field of technology and a good potential for continuing their higher education studies or finding work once their competence has been recognised. Metropolia's engineering training is the largest and most international in Finland, which gives the UAS the resources to assess foreign engineering degrees and to arrange demonstration examinations for recognising competence.

The competence demonstration centre's operations will be later expanded so as to cover fields that provide the most benefit to the labour market, such as health care and social services. Coordination on a national level will be carried out with the UniPID network of the University of Jyväskylä, which has received funding from the Ministry of Education and Culture for piloting the responsible higher education institution model.

For further information, please contact:

Tuire Ranta-Meyer
Director, Stakeholder Relations
tel. +358 50 5262002
tuire.ranta-meyer@metropolia.fi

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