Language is absolutely central to our lives: without it, we cannot understand the world around us. It is indeed a vital tool that affects several aspects of everyday life such as occupation and social participation. We use language to communicate thoughts and ideas, as well as forge friendships, cultural ties, and economic relationships. One of the first components necessary for understanding language is to understand how we assign meaning to words. Something that has not been explored much when it comes to language training courses for immigrants.

Many language courses offered today are developed from the host country’s point of view – it can be likened to the way businesses used to be done back in the day where you would mass-produce goods and expect the market to blindly buy your products because you assume they need it.  It is sad that in this time and age, many immigrants receiving countries are still operating from the assumption that immigrants are a homogenous group with the same language needs.

Finland in particular has been struggling with successfully integrating immigrants, particularly skilled immigrants into the labour market because of lack of customer-centred trainings. The current language courses offered to skilled immigrants are textbook oriented, teacher-based one-size fits all services.

According to a 2016 report by the ministry of economic affairs and employment, Finland’s current language training for adult immigrants is inadequate and its content does not match the work-related skills employers are looking for.

Inadequate Finnish language skills has been strongly associated with unemployment of skilled immigrants in Finland.

But there is hope – Elasi. Elasi is a language learning solution that offers job-specific language courses for skilled immigrants, so they can find work that match their skills. Elasi puts the clients first and works together with them and other key stakeholders to develop services that matter to them and relevant to a given market.

For our first service we focus on foreign nurse and Finnish healthcare providers. To understand that, when foreign nurses move to Finland, they are looking for better opportunities and care growth, yet their biggest obstacle is usually work-related Finnish language skills. Finnish healthcare providers, on the other hand, faced with nursing shortage are reluctant to hire these nurses because of insufficient language skills.

Elasi’s solution offers these nurses job-specific vocabulary, language and communication skills they need to be able to find relevant work and growth in their career. In doing so, we build the confidence of healthcare providers to hire foreign nurses.

Our team has come from far to bring Elasi to where it is: three years of user research, market research that led to defining the problem, defining the customer and validating the problem. Currently, we are at the development stage where we have developed the solution concept, our first prototype, and we are working on our final prototype to pilot with a number of companies that have shown interest in our business.

The driving force for us, and the thing that keeps us going is the lifechanging impact we have on our users and clients. When they finally achieve their dreams and find a sense of belonging here in Finland. Our clients are the reason for our existence and we live, breath and tirelessly work to help them find the door to new opportunities.

We are a multidisciplinary and multicultural team of four with over 20 years of experience in Health promotion, marketing and advertising, language teaching, web-development and graphic design. Together we form the proper fusion to execute Elasi’s vision and change the way language training is offered to skilled immigrants in Finland, Europe and in key immigrant-receiving countries.

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