Employment

Labour and employment policy aims to increase jobs and employment and reduce unemployment. Recently, labour and employment policy has emphasised increasing the supply of labour, but good employment and securing the availability of skilled labour requires a variety of interventions and a combination of different policy measures.  

Employment and employment management are increasingly seen as both tools for balancing public finances and important factors in terms of regional vitality. 

In recent years, we have implemented employment-related projects on the following themes: 

• the efficiency and effectiveness of employment services and policies 
• the effects of service structure reforms 
• the availability of skilled labour 
• anticipation of regional labour needs 
• the effectiveness of various employment experiments; and 
• support for the implementation of the TE 2024 reform 

The common theme across these projects is that they seek to promote the effectiveness and effectiveness-oriented development of employment-friendly policies. 

At the beginning of 2025, responsibility for the organisation of public employment services was transferred from the state to the municipalities. This change is called the TE Services 2024 reform. The purpose of the reform was to bring services closer to customers. At the same time, the Nordic employment services model and the reform of digital TE services have also been prepared. We support the new employment areas and individual municipalities in implementing the reform. 

Competence development has become a topical theme with the new skills needs and gaps created by the transformation of working life and digitalisation. At the individual level, competence development usually means adding to and developing an employee’s knowledge and skills, for example through various training mechanisms and support for the identification of one’s own competence development. 

Competence development is also an important goal at the national political level, as it is essentially related, among other things, to 

• raising employment rates 
• extending careers 
• ensuring the availability of a skilled workforce; and 
• promoting the meaningfulness of careers. 

Continuous learning is one of the primary concepts related to competence development. It contributes to the development and renewal of skills at different stages of life and is not only linked to the education system but is also intended to enable skills to be developed flexibly alongside work. Thus, in the future, the dialogue between working life, education and lifelong learning, as well as the development of relations between them at the societal level will be increasingly emphasised.