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READER QUESTIONS

What happens to your Swedish work permit if you lose your job?

Losing your job is never ideal, but for those in Sweden on a work permit there's another layer of worry. Can you stay in Sweden to look for work? Can you change career? Here's what happens.

Published: 26 January 2023 15:56 CET
Updated: 15 February 2023 07:07 CET
What happens to your Swedish work permit if you lose your job?
In most cases, you have a three-month grace period in which to find a new job before you have to leave Sweden. Photo: Tim Aro/TT

First off, the information below only applies to non-EU citizens in Sweden who have a residence permit linked to their work permit: not EU citizens or their family members, and not people with post-Brexit residence status or other types of residence permit (uppehållstillstånd).

The good news, is you won’t be kicked out of Sweden the minute you lose your job: you have a three-month grace period after losing your job to find a new one and apply for a new work permit.

You may not even have to apply for a new work permit if you continue to work in the same occupation with a different employer. If you’ve worked in Sweden for 24 months or longer, you are free to change employer without applying for a new permit, as long as you’re working in the same profession and your old permit is still valid. You will, however, still need to apply for a new permit once your old one expires.

If you have been working in Sweden for fewer than 24 months, your permit is tied to a specific employer and a specific occupation, so you’ll need to apply for a new permit if you move to a different company.

As long as you have a residence permit, you have that three-month period to find work. You’ll need to show potential employers you have the right to live and work in Sweden.

If you’re successful in finding a new job within three months, you need to apply for a new work permit if you’ve either had the old one for less than 24 months or have changed occupations, regardless of how long you’ve had your permit. You can work while your new permit is being processed as long as you applied before the old one ran out and before the end of the three-month period.

Make sure that your new job fulfils the relevant requirements, such as having been advertised in Sweden, the EU/EEA and Switzerland before you started working there, an acceptable salary for your branch and the relevant insurance. You can see the most up-to-date requirements here.

Things get more complicated if your work permit is due to expire within this three-month grace period. In that case, you need to apply for an extension of your residence and work permit, and to do that you need to be able to provide a signed employment contract from your new employer in your application. Get in touch with the Swedish Migration Agency if this applies to you.

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READER INSIGHTS

My Swedish Career: ‘Stockholm is a great place to try and do a startup’

In this article for our My Swedish Career series, The Local spoke to Stockholm-based Karthik Muthuswamy, who started data journalism studio Explained after more than a decade working in tech.

Published: 13 April 2023 12:19 CEST
My Swedish Career: 'Stockholm is a great place to try and do a startup'

Muthuswamy who was born and raised in Chennai, India, originally moved to Sweden to study computer science in 2009. He became interested in data journalism after ten years working as a programmer.

“I was just saturated,” he says. “I wanted some purpose with work, and in the last couple of years, tech has been sort of destroying journalism, to be honest, like with Facebook, and all the Cambridge Analytics stuff, and fake news and so on.”

This urge to find a way in which tech could instead be beneficial to journalism led Muthuswamy to leave the tech industry and study a master’s in data journalism in the UK.

“I did this master’s, and as I was reading research on this, I was really like ‘you know, data journalism could really be a saviour for journalism, because it can actually make it interesting and make people come back to news websites from social media’,” he says.

“Data journalism is expressed in text in the form of a chart or some visuals, and it’s both an image, but it has information at the same time,” he explains. “It’s kind of too late for humanity, people are already too used to visuals and they want that, so data journalism provides the solution of combining that.”

Stockholm ‘fantastic’ place for startups

After graduation, he moved back to Stockholm with his Swedish wife Hanna and their child, and started his data journalism studio, Explained, where he now works.

“What we do is data journalism projects for other news media, research centres, and so on,” he tells The Local.

“Part of our product is to translate or localise data from the European context to various national contexts,” he says. “Like finding insights which are interesting for different countries.”

“If there is new inflation data, then we would look for what’s interesting for every country in Europe, and we will be able to make stories for all the countries customised for that context, so to speak.”

Sweden is very different to growing up in India, Muthuswamy says, but he’s become used to it. “I’m into winter sports, for example. So I don’t mind cold weather that much.”

Karthik and his wife Hanna at the top of Kebnekaise. Photo: private.

The Swedish capital’s bustling tech scene, home to thousands of startups, is another big draw.

“Stockholm is a great place to try and do a startup, to be honest,” he says. “I’m discovering more and more new things along the way.”

He launched Explained through the Verksamt programme at Arbetsförmedlingen, a collaboration between more than 45 different Swedish government agencies designed to simplify the process of setting up a company. Muthuswamy describes it as a “how-to manual”.

“You go there and you just have to follow the steps,” he says.

“Along the way, you will discover various perks, and you get access to a portal, which connects you to various advisors like other people who have been running successful startups for many years. You get questions and get advice from them based on whatever topic you could think of, and that is provided by the state,” he adds.

‘I guess I just have to start it myself’

Swedish newsrooms use less data journalism than in newsrooms in other countries such as the UK or US, Muthuswamy explains, which was one of the reasons he ended up launching Explained, despite an original goal of working for a British newspaper after graduation.

“I actually wanted to work for The Guardian or the Financial Times at the time, I had even applied for a job,” he says. “But, you know, we had the move here, and I couldn’t work remotely for the UK media.”

“I didn’t even see a job ad for data analysts or anything in the Swedish media. So I just thought ‘okay, I guess I have to just start it myself and make it happen’.”

Although the plan wasn’t originally to come back to Sweden and launch a startup, Muthuswamy admits that he had it in the back of his mind as a possibility when the family returned to Stockholm last year.

“I used to work at another data journalism startup before actually, in Stockholm, Datastory. So I knew this space quite well.”

Explained’s co-founder, Georgios Karamanis, a psychiatrist-turned-data visualisations designer, also has a background in data journalism and so-called ‘data art’, in particular.

“Data art doesn’t only convert localised information, but also makes it look nice, to make reading information more enjoyable,” Muthuswamy explains.

Things are now “going pretty well” at Explained, Muthuswamy says, with new people recently joining, including a data journalist with experience working for the BBC.

The startup now works with media services in other European countries like Austria and Germany, despite the smaller interest in data journalism in Swedish media, he says.

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