Employment of newly arrived migrants can be seen as one of the key aspects to managing both national labour market needs and the inclusion of individuals in both work and society. In Sweden, efforts to manage recent migration-for example, from Syria-has resulted in various labour market 'fast tracks' that aim to facilitate labour market integration. In this article, we consider how individual migrants attempt to negotiate the new national demands of professional identity to become teachers in Sweden by following a Swedish introduction course to teaching. The study builds on qualitative interviews and fieldwork following two different cohorts of students.
This article analyses the case of a Swedish so-called “fast-track” programme for newly arrived migrant teachers with the use of a conceptual model of lifelong learning dimensions (Boyadjieva & Ilieva-Trichkova, 2016). The material is based on individual and focus group interviews with individual participants, public employment officers and university teachers. While some aspects of the course can be seen as transformative and allowing for intrinsic learning, the participants’ need for work often overshadowed more ambitious course goals. Nevertheless, the course provides participants with the opportunity to reflect on new aspects of teaching and broader societal values.
A recent policy reform in Sweden reorganized the management of newly arrived migrants' entrance into the labour market, which resulted in the Swedish Public Employment Service being given coordinating responsibility and introducing private service providers. Building on qualitative interviews with public employment officers and private actors, this study focuses on how the political contradictions in the new 2‐year introduction programme are managed at the organizational level. In the article, it is argued that although both public employment officers and private actors experience difficulty separating unemployed migrants' need for social support from the workfare ambitions of the programme, aspects of privatization—such as freedom of choice and the service specification—further complicate this situation. Thus, the individualization aspects of the policy should be viewed as countering some of the more controlling aspects of the reform, thus, in effect, neutralizing its liberalizing tendencies.
In a 2010 policy reform, the centre-right Swedish government attempted to bring the area of integration policy into closer alignment with labour market policy for newly arrived migrants. In this paper, empirical data gathered from 181 individual case files from the Public Employment Service (PES) is used to analyse the different trajectories of migrants. I construct a typology of five different sub-groups to explore how migrants manage the different challenges of the policy program. The main contribution of the article is to highlight the individual differences among the group and how various strategies are formed within the same policy framework.
Amongst the most significant labour market challenges is the integration of migrants and the opportunities for individual migrants to find employment that match their qualifications. The object of this study is to analyse the formal and informal obstacles migrant teachers face when entering the labour market. These obstacles include the formal validation of existing credentials, as well as the needs of local schools, and migrant teachers’ own experiences of the new school system. We have conducted qualitative interviews with school principals, representatives at labour market organizations and authorities and migrant teachers. By analysing these different accounts we argue that the individual career adaptability of migrants also needs to be understood in relation to institutional and organizational constraints. Moreover, by adding a temporal understanding to the integration process, we find that migrants’ own perception of the process and the time-scales of entering work should be accounted for more explicitly in the guidance process.
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