For many years now, we have heard that Denmark needs to be more balanced. We should relocate educational and job opportunities to the rural municipalities; everything shouldn’t just stay in the capital or university cities. It makes sense when politicians and all the many smart people with fancy titles say this on TV. But my experiences in the Danish job market show that it largely remains an idea.
For the past 13 years, I have worked on managing large IT projects in Ireland, and if you read the Danish media, managing such projects is something that Denmark could certainly use. So when I moved to Southern Jutland about six months ago, I imagined it would be easy to continue my career.
I thought I should be systematic in my job search—there was no need for my unemployment to last longer than necessary. I was eager to get started. So I called the job center to get a list of institutions, authorities, and companies in the local area that might need my skills. After all, many state jobs have been relocated to rural municipalities, according to the media, and when you work in IT, you can work for a private company in another city and just work from home some days, I thought.
But I was apparently wrong. At the job center, they told me that there was no demand for my qualifications in Southern Denmark. I was overqualified for public sector jobs, according to the advisor. The reasoning was that more than five years of experience would intimidate the managers for someone like me, seeking my first job in Denmark. And if I wanted to apply in the private sector, I would have to move to Aarhus or Copenhagen, where all the big companies working with IT project management in Denmark are located. The idea of working from home was dismissed by the advisor. Despite the apparent assumption that people engaged in IT projects should be able to use digital meeting platforms, it just doesn’t work, they said. Especially in project management, you need to meet face to face, I was informed. Move, they advised. The jobs are in the cities, not on the outskirts.
But I don’t want to move. I moved to Southern Jutland for a reason, and that reason is my mother. She is 83 years old and has become elderly. I am her only child, so we agreed that it was time for me to return to Denmark. Since my mother lives in Haderslev and the purpose of my return is solely to be close to her, it does not make sense for me to move hours away, as I might as well have stayed abroad.
The advisor at the job center understood this, so they suggested I instead pursue an education as a social and healthcare assistant. There’s a demand for that in Southern Jutland. So now I’m back in school, studying to become a social and healthcare assistant.
It’s actually quite fine. I don’t mind diving into new things. But I must say that I am puzzled that after nearly 10 years of efforts to create a more balanced Denmark, we haven’t come further. I simply don’t understand why, in one of the world’s most digitized countries, we find it so difficult to imagine the possibility of working from home so people can live in the countryside and work in the big cities. Deep down, I can’t help but wonder why they would rather spend time and resources training me for a new career when I already have skills and experience in a field where Denmark clearly lacks qualified labor.
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