European jobs for Ukraine

WEBINAR: Mykolaiv-born Yaroslav Skorov answers questions on studying and working in the UK,
where he has built a career the last 20 years.

On the 25th February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, a small group of electronic commerce workers, as shocked and sickened as the rest of Europe, got together. The group shared a common hope that they could help the flow of refugees which you could already see crowding train stations to escape the new war zone north of Kyiv.

Team Work Across Boarders - Together for Ukraine

The group of electronic commerce workers founded Europratsya, which translates to “eurojobs” in Ukrainian. With their everyday digital skills, the small team of three people from Norway, Serbia and Italy built a job portal (also naming the portal Europratsya) meant for the hundreds of thousands, later millions, who were forced to flee Ukraine.

As Europratsya spent the next weeks building a comprehensive, digital service for Ukrainian women looking for safe jobs with fair pay.

Anastasia Sychova (top left) has moved her career fairs business in Kyiv to the
Netherlands. She answers questions on the employment market outside of Ukraine

Spreading crucial information in the search of safety

A group of five bilingual Ukrainian students took care of the translation work from March onwards. They were Erasmus students, stuck abroad when disaster struck their home country, but motivated to channel their energy to help. At the end of long days at lectures, they made time in the evenings for technical and difficult translation work. How to have your dentist degree accredited in Germany, which job sectors are hiring in Norway, how to get a work visa in Switzerland – the need for information was huge. Together, the Erasmus students helped fellow Ukrainians find simple, step by step guides in their own language, to save them navigating dozens and dozens of different government websites across Europe.

Come May, the team was bolstered by another four young Ukrainians, currently studying at the university of Lviv. They started on the outreach.

Throughout the summer of war, as the bad news kept pouring in, they patiently built an ecosystem to spread work opportunities amongst distraught Ukrainians. Together with a Ukrainian designer, and without a marketing budget, they’ve created a professional platform with almost 2000 followers and a reach of 600-1100 views per post. New vacancies, new career advice and invitations to workshops could be promoted in minutes.

TELEGRAM CHANNEL: Anna, Andrii, Krystyna and Anastasia are the team of four behind the
Europratsya Telegram channel. Demand for vacancies and career advice has seen followers, views
and shares increase week on week as word spreads.

With the early financial support from Grieg Foundation, Europratsya is now an ally for thousands of Ukrainians who need help to translate their CVs, prepare for job interviews, or discuss how to retrain to prepare for a new work environment. A typical Europratsya undertaking is a webinar, where Telegram followers can sign up for a workshop on for example the Scandinavian employment market. The webinars are done in Ukrainian or English, depending on the speaker, and on the day 50-100 mostly female job-seekers log on. The users are often in their 20s and 30s, many still thinking about leaving their country ahead of a tough winter, and needing encouragement, advice and a self-esteem boost to trust that they can make a life for themselves outside their country.

The Ukrainian women hoping for safe work and plan to protect their children from the scars of war which is often very different. Many are still in education, some have 20 year long work careers. Some only speak Russian and Ukrainian, some have worked as au pairs abroad or already have English as their workplace language. Some take pride in their qualifications as engineers, accountants or lawyers, some are fearful that their education won’t be recognised and that they’ll end up in low paid and insecure jobs. Often Europratsya team members follow up with personal video calls to match them with employers and opportunities. These personal video calls reveal that they all have one thing in common: