My TE-office experience

​Over the five years I have been living in Finland I have been in contact with the TE-office for four. I have some very conflicting feelings and experiences from all of that. In the beginning everything was good, and I had a very nice and understanding official with whom I made the social integration plan to study Finnish language and culture. For the time I have lived here I have moved several times and I have been communicating with several different officials each one being a worse experience than the previous. 

​After my language studies had ended I felt like the officials weren’t really listening to me and my wishes but instead they were pushing their own to me. I made plans together and yet I got assignments that overruled my own wishes. For example, I had been searching for courses by myself and when I found one the TE-office had found one by themselves too and I had to take the one they had chosen not the one I had found even if that one would have been filling the TE-office requirements as well.

Worst part has been my last two years because my TE-office official is an immigrant as well. Our conversations have been mostly over the phone and in Finnish. She has a very strong accent that makes it very difficult for me to really understand all she says and the letters I have received from her have had some bad grammar mistakes. During the conversations I have had to ask her to repeat herself many time to make sure that I have understood what she had just said and that made her very impatient and she often had very vocal sighs of frustration.

​During these two years I have studied myself a new profession here and I was expected to report the progress of my studies to the TE-office which I did. However I did have to keep asking if the official had received my reports to which she often replied with a delay of well over a week. Same thing was happening when I asked for help and clarification, I had to wait for a long time for an answer. I am not expecting them to answer to me right away, they do have hundreds of people to manage per person after all. I would appreciate some acknowledgement that my emails have been received.

Now that I have graduated there was time to update my plan of employment. Again, all I got was a phone call not a face to face meeting. During that phone call I was briefly interviewed and quickly asked what kind of work I would like to look for. I didn’t get a change to really express my wishes of what I would like and would not like to do because the occupation I studied qualifies me to do many very different kinds of work. All I was able to say was that I would like to do office work and that pretty much concluded the call. After that I started receiving the work offers that mostly had job description of customer service over phone. Exactly the kind that I do not like to do. The jobs seem to have almost always a requirement for fluent Finnish which I do not have.
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The situation for me is very frustrating and I am certain that I am not the only immigrant facing these issues. For me it would be very important and helpful if I would be able to have face to face meetings where to really go through the plan and where my hopes and wishes are listened. I would like to have an official who would acknowledge me and my questions in a reasonable time. Most of all I would like to have an TE-office relationship where at least one of us was fluent in Finnish. These decisions made in and with TE-office do have a big impact on my personal economy and wellbeing.

​(Thayhl)