Fleeing a country means losing more than a place. It often means losing a professional identity built over years or decades: a job in which someone was genuinely skilled, a professional network built up over time, a language in which everyday communication was effortless. What arrives with a person is themselves — their biography, their competencies — but putting that potential to use in an unfamiliar country, with rules that still need to be learned, is far from straightforward.
This challenge is well documented. Studies on labour market integration across Europe consistently identify the non-recognition of qualifications brought from abroad as one of the biggest structural barriers refugees face — with real economic costs, both for the individuals affected and for host societies. In Austria, this pattern is clearly visible too: recent data shows that around 30 percent of employed refugees feel overqualified for their current role. While this share has fallen sharply among refugee men in recent years, it has remained stubbornly constant at around 50 percent among refugee women — a possible sign of structural barriers that go beyond language or paperwork alone.
For Ukrainian refugees in Austria specifically, the picture is similarly mixed: labour force participation among Ukrainian women has risen substantially since 2022, yet their unemployment rate remains well above the Austrian average. And this is despite an unusually high level of education: international data shows that more than three-quarters of Ukrainian refugee women hold a university degree — an exceptionally high figure by international standards. What leaves Ukraine, in other words, is not a lack of qualification. It is highly qualified potential that, without the right support, often sits unused in the new country.
There is also an often-underestimated layer of uncertainty that shapes how people engage with any integration offer: the question of how long they will actually stay. Someone who doesn’t know whether they will still be in the country in a year plans differently, invests differently, and commits differently to new opportunities. Professional devaluation, the need to reorient linguistically, family responsibilities, and structural uncertainty combine differently for every single person — and that is precisely the starting point UNITE takes seriously.
Rather than designing one course, one timetable, one process for everyone, UNITE is built around the opposite principle: the programme adapts to the person, not the person to the programme. Research on employment programmes broadly supports this: initiatives that combine multiple forms of support and follow individuals personally over time consistently outperform standardised, one-size-fits-all measures — and individual, ongoing support turns out to be one of the strongest success factors of all, often more important than any single specific measure used.
None of this makes the underlying structural challenges disappear — recognition procedures remain slow and complex, and no amount of individual coaching can fully substitute for institutional reform. But it does mean that, within the space UNITE can influence, we are choosing to treat every person’s situation as the starting point, not as an inconvenience to be worked around. It’s a more demanding way to run a programme. Based on what we’ve seen so far, it is also the one that actually works.
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Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Social Innovation Initiative. Neither the European Union nor the Social Innovation Initiative can be held responsible for them.
