Joseph Laku land­ed his first job in Oulu through the grapevine – “My boss had to draw his instruc­tions for me, because we had no com­mon lan­guage“

Joseph Laku from South Sudan has been hap­py work­ing for the same employ­er for 15 years.

Joseph Laku can still remem­ber what it was like to arrive in Oulu in the mid­dle of the win­ter. For some­one from South Sudan, the cold and the snow were amaz­ing ele­ments – almost shock­ing ones, actu­al­ly. But he has grown accus­tomed to the local cli­mate by now.

He has even tried cross-coun­try ski­ing a few times.

Joseph came to Fin­land with his fam­i­ly in 2004 and moved straight to Oulu. He came here as a refugee because of a con­flict in South Sudan, after spend­ing some time in Egypt first.

– Some friends of mine told me Fin­land was a good and safe coun­try to live in.

Dur­ing his first years in Oulu, Joseph stud­ied sub­jects like the Finnish lan­guage while look­ing for work. He also did a degree in Busi­ness Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy.

Through an acquain­tance of his wife’s, Joseph heard of an open­ing at Rantek, an equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­er in the field of elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing, and end­ed up work­ing there. Joseph is now 47 years old and Rantek was his very first employ­er in Fin­land.

This year, Joseph is cel­e­brat­ing his 15th anniver­sary work­ing for the Oulu-based com­pa­ny. What is more, he now has a dual cit­i­zen­ship, as he acquired the Finnish cit­i­zen­ship in 2018.

– In 2007, I did not know much of the Finnish lan­guage. My supe­ri­or had dif­fi­cul­ties explain­ing my tasks to me and had to draw them at first, because we had no com­mon lan­guage. My work­mates helped me out a lot and some­times I also spoke with them in Eng­lish.

Find­ing employ­ment plays an impor­tant role when a per­son is inte­grat­ing to a new place.

Nowa­days, Joseph com­mu­ni­cates in Finnish at work and says that he is still study­ing the lan­guage inde­pen­dent­ly.

He says that he has adjust­ed to his work com­mu­ni­ty well. He has no spe­cial career plans and hopes to be able to work at Rantek for a long time to come.

Joseph works as a coil­er which means that he man­u­fac­tures things such as parts for elec­tric motors accord­ing to cus­tomer needs.

Joseph does some of the work inde­pen­dent­ly and the rest with a part­ner. He thinks that the work­ing cul­ture at Rantek is a relaxed one, which means flex­i­ble work­ing hours, decent hol­i­day peri­ods, and free week­ends.

– I enjoy the work and my col­leagues are nice. We have ade­quate breaks, and the boss is not breath­ing down our necks.

”Con­stant short­age of employ­ees”

Rantek oper­ates in the Rusko dis­trict of Oulu, with an employ­ee base of around 45 peo­ple. Coil­ing is one of the fun­da­men­tal oper­a­tions of the com­pa­ny, entail­ing high­ly skilled hand­i­work util­is­ing relat­ed machin­ery at the same time. Besides coil­ing, the core exper­tise of the com­pa­ny includes machin­ing as well as assem­bly and test­ing of end prod­ucts.

CEO Juha-Mat­ti Rantapää says that the com­pa­ny cur­rent­ly employs about ten coil­ing spe­cial­ists.

Rantek was estab­lished by Juha-Matti’s father, and Juha-Mat­ti has been work­ing there for 20 years, the last ten of which as an entre­pre­neur.

At one point, the com­pa­ny had a unit also in Kos­to­muk­sha, Rus­sia.

When the oper­a­tions in Kos­to­muk­sha were ter­mi­nat­ed, Rantek hired sev­er­al Russ­ian employ­ees to Oulu. Two of them still work for the com­pa­ny.

– We par­tic­i­pat­ed in the immi­gra­tion process and acquired the work per­mits for our Russ­ian employ­ees, for exam­ple. But, in those days, we did not have the time to think how and where to get sup­port for hir­ing inter­na­tion­al tal­ent.

Now, Rantek employs sev­er­al dif­fer­ent nation­al­i­ties. Last autumn they hired a Pol­ish tal­ent who was already liv­ing in Fin­land.

– There is a con­stant short­age of employ­ees in our field, and suit­able tal­ent can­not always be found in Fin­land. Many peo­ple have found our vacant posts through the grapevine and adapt­ed well, Juha-Mat­ti says.

– Even though we are hir­ing inter­na­tion­al tal­ent, I have not changed my style of lead­er­ship. We work fair­ly and coher­ent­ly with every­one – no mat­ter what their back­ground is.

Is your com­pa­ny in need of inter­na­tion­al tal­ent?

Are you plan­ning to go inter­na­tion­al, and your com­pa­ny is fac­ing chal­lenges find­ing the right pro­fes­sion­als? Oulu Tal­ent Hub can help you!

The goal of Oulu Tal­ent Hub is to match inter­na­tion­al tal­ent with local com­pa­nies suf­fer­ing from labour short­age. There are a lot of inter­na­tion­al stu­dents and fresh­ly grad­u­at­ed tal­ent liv­ing in Oulu, ready to bring their exper­tise to your com­pa­ny – as employ­ees or trainees.

The Oulu Tal­ent Hub project is fund­ed by the Euro­pean Social Fund (ESF) and car­ried out by Business­Oulu, Uni­ver­si­ty of Oulu, Oulu Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences, Edu­ca­tion­al Con­sor­tium OSAO, and Oulu Cham­ber of Com­merce.

Find out more about our free ser­vices and con­tact us with any ques­tions: oulutalenthub.fi