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WORKING IN NORWAY

What is Norway’s immigration directorate doing to reduce work permit times?

The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) took an average of 87 days to process a work permit last year. We asked them what they are doing to reduce waiting times.

Published: 8 February 2023 16:02 CET
Updated: 12 February 2023 09:34 CET
A mockup of a residence card.
This is what the UDI is doing to improve waiting times for work permits. Pictured: A mockup of a residence card.

What is the reason for current long waiting times? 

The UDI puts down the slow processing times to the introduction of dual citizenship in 2020, which led to a surge in citizenship applications, which then combined with the backlog still left over from the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“Work with entry restrictions required a lot of resources and both the UDI’s and the police’s work was affected in different ways by the corona situation,” Karl Erik Sjøholt, the directorate’s director of residence, told The Local.

“An important factor was also the opening for dual citizenship from January 2020, which resulted in a large increase in the number of citizenship applications.” 

You can check the current wait times for different types of permit here. 

READ ALSO: 

What does the directorate want to do about it? 

The directorate hopes to clear the backlog of work permits by the end of 2023 and to then begin to reduce waiting waiting times for applications for residence permits as skilled workers to around 30 days, as it was before 2020, with only the most complex cases taking longer to process. 

What measures is UDI taking to solve the problem?

The directorate says it is only able to hire additional employees to process work permits “in line with the budget and any political wishes”. 

It has, however, changed the way it organises its staff to bring more resources to work on the problem, and also changed the way it handles work permit cases.

“We are continually looking to make case handling more efficient.” Sjøholt said. “We have changed the structural staff setup and [established] new collaboration methods [and] automated processes.” 

The changed way of handling work permits reduced waiting times for most applicants in 2022, but meant that some of those who applied before January 1st 2022 have had to wait even longer. 

READ ALSO: 

In Norway, UDI has changed the way it handles cases to shorten waiting times at the start of 2022. While this has improved the situation for many applicants, it has also meant that some of the more complex applications submitted before the start of 2022 have taken even longer to process. 

“UDI is aware that some applicants from before 2022 have had to wait longer, but we have completed a large part of these cases, and most of the cases from before 2022 will be completed in the first half of 2023,” a UDI spokesperson told The Local last week. 

The directorate also plans to start automating the processing of some work permit applications, after successfully using an automated system to process citizenship applications. 

“We have good results from using automation in citizenship applications. In 2022 approximately 30 percent of all applications for citizenship were automatically processed,” Sjøholt said. “We are also looking to expand automation to other case areas.”

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WORKING IN NORWAY

Why overqualified foreigners in Norway struggle to find work

Norway is one of the worst countries in Europe when it comes to overqualified foreign labour being stuck in jobs that don’t make the best use of their skills, a new analysis has found. 

Published: 23 April 2024 11:38 CEST
Why overqualified foreigners in Norway struggle to find work

Norway is one of many European countries struggling with “brain waste”, which is where immigrants struggle to find suitable full-time work or are overqualified for their roles due to their education not being recognised. 

The findings are part of an investigation by Lighthouse Reports, the Financial Times, El País and Unbias The News that found that most European countries fail to provide good job opportunities to educated foreigners – potentially at the cost of their labour forces and economies. 

“While the results differ slightly between labour market outcomes, a consistent pattern emerges: immigrants lag behind natives everywhere, but brain waste is worst in Southern Europe, Norway, and Sweden,” the report read. 

Some of the metrics used to measure brain waste were the proportion of foreign residents who were overqualified for their role, underemployed (meaning they weren’t working as much as they could), or unemployed. 

In Norway, 27.6 percent of university-educated Norwegians were overqualified for their roles, according to the report. Meanwhile, just over half of the university-educated immigrant population were overqualified for their job. 

This figure made Norway one of the countries with the largest raw difference in the percentage of the native population being overqualified compared to the immigrant population. 

Furthermore, the number of immigrants who were underemployed, 3.9 percent, was more than double the rate of Norwegians in the same position. 

The investigation used figures from Eurostat between 2017 and 2022. 

Norway’s Directorate of Integration and Diversity has recently investigated the obstacles facing the country’s foreign population in the workplace. 

Its report found that immigrants faced barriers both when trying to progress their careers or simply trying to get their foot in the door. 

Immigrants working in Norway were also more likely to leave working life earlier or lose their jobs. 

READ ALSO: The biggest barriers foreigners in Norway face at work

Factors such as working in temp positions, physically taxing occupations, and industries exposed to economic turbulence contributed to this. 

However, a lack of Norwegian proficiency, a lack of relevant skills and poor health also played a part. 

Discrimination prevented immigrants from entering the workplace and affected those who were employed. 

“More and more people in the population have contact with immigrants in working life, and most experience that contact as mainly positive. At the same time, one in four immigrants has experienced discrimination in the workplace, and this discrimination can occur in different forms and in different working situations,” the report read.

The directorate also said that most companies didn’t have concrete measures to try and promote diversity.

One factor holding back immigrants in Norway was their Norwegian language skills, the report said. 

While Norwegian skills were moving in the right direction, less than half of foreigners in the country had advanced Norwegian language skills (level B2 according to the European framework) after completing language training.

Meanwhile, Lighthouse Reports’ investigation found that brain waste in Norway varied from profession to profession. For example, Norway was one of a number of countries where college-educated immigrants were more likely to be doctors. 

Immigrants with a university education in IT-related subjects were also far less likely to be overqualified. There, the difference between migrants being overqualified compared to natives was just 2 percent. 

However, physical and engineering science technicians, engineering professionals (excluding electrotechnology), and those who have studied education at a university level were the immigrant groups in Norway most likely to be overqualified. 

One thing to note is that immigrants who obtained their qualifications in Norway were far less likely to be overqualified than those who got their degrees outside of Norway, even if they still fared worse than natives overall. 

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