Pay groups explained, without the jargon

Everyone asks the same question: which group will I be in? The honest answer is that nobody can tell you before your work has been looked at — but the rules are written down, and you can read them the same way your employer does.

The group follows the work, not the years

Both the electrical and the building-services agreements describe each group by what a person can do: which materials and methods they command, whether they work from drawings without step-by-step supervision, how many areas of competence they cover, and whether they carry responsibility for a team or for a whole installation. Years of experience appear nowhere in that description.

That is why our calculator asks you to pick the description that fits the work you actually do, rather than how long you have done it. Experience and a diploma still matter — they are how you show that you can do the work — but they do not set the group by themselves.

Special rules worth knowing

Under the electrical agreement, if no pay-group determination has been made at all, the agreement requires pay according to group 2. This is not a general rule for the waiting period — it applies where the determination has simply not been done.

Under the building-services agreement, section 11.8 sets a floor for an installer who is posted to Finland or comes here temporarily while keeping a permanent home abroad: for the first three months the group is at least 2, and a higher group can be set from the start. A floor is not a ceiling and not a fixed range.

A Finnish further vocational qualification or specialist qualification also carries a supplement per hour under both agreements — 0.63 € and 1.12 € in the electrical agreement, 0.60 € and 1.11 € in building services. A foreign qualification is not automatically equivalent; it has to be recognised. The national agency's advisory statement on a vocational qualification completed abroad costs 277.36 € including VAT and a recognition decision 495 €, with a waiting time of two to four months.

What does not move your group

A safety card does not. Cards and permits open a gate — they let you onto the site or let you take a particular task — but no card is a pay grade in either agreement. The one exception works indirectly: when a card lets you take on work that belongs to a higher classification, it is the work that moves you, not the plastic.

Nationality, mother tongue and country of residence do not move it either, in any direction. Pay-group classification on those grounds is prohibited (Non-Discrimination Act 1325/2014, section 8), and a language requirement has to be objectively related to the work or to site safety — on the sites we staff, that requirement is English for instructions and safety briefings, not Finnish.

How to ask for a review, in a way that works

Put it in writing and make it concrete: which installations you now carry out from drawings without step-by-step supervision, which systems you commission, which areas of competence you cover, whether others work under your instruction. Name the projects and the dates. A request that lists work is a request an employer can check against the agreement; a request that lists years is not.

Ask at the same time which group was recorded, on what date, and by whom — you are entitled to know. If a determination has never been made, that is itself an answer with consequences under the electrical agreement.

Why we show two groups and no percentage

A comparison made from a form can land between two adjacent groups, and saying so is more useful than a single number dressed up with a confidence figure. So the result is a pair of groups, marked "for review", with the reasoning printed next to it. Where your answers do not compare with any description in the agreement — or where the agreement that applies is not yet clear — the calculator shows no figures at all and offers a manual assessment instead. A number we cannot stand behind would be worse than no number.