Finland

The main outcomes achieved are the regional networks between educational institutions and their personnel. The networks provide information, guidance and counselling. One of the main outcomes of the project is the created networking model. The beneficiaries can be found at two levels: (1) personnel working in information, guidance and counselling services get new tools and resources for their work; (2) the final beneficiaries are students or people searching for learning possibilities, and who get improved services for that purpose. According to the evaluation report, both these groups have benefited from the project. Completely unexpected costs were not reported. The challenge is that after the project ended in 2014, the model was intended to keep running by educational institutions that participated to the model. Due to budget cuts, there have been problems to find funding for the information, guidance and counselling services. That has lead to some problems - when new employees enter the organisation they don´t know the network and there are no available resources for keeping up the connections with the whole network.

The Research Institute of Finnish Economy has evaluated the model. They found evidence that working for the Job Bank improved the labour market prospects for that individual, indicating that the model has worked. By the beginning of 2016, almost 10,000 people had become employed through the Job Bank. The beneficiaries have been the expected ones, mainly for the long-term unemployed. The expected number of employed persons was not achieved and it was difficult to find employment for partially disabled people. An unexpected difficulty was that fewer than expected long-term unemployed people were interested in the trial. For that reason it took more advertising and marketing costs than expected. This was the case especially for those municipalities and Job Banks that had a contract for employing long-term unemployed.

There is no evidence so far.

The effectiveness is monitored systematically with two main indicators. They are the share of trained persons who have found employment within 2 months after training and OPAL-survey, which collects feedback from the participants. The latest report is from 2016 with figures for 2015. In 2015, about 49% of participants were employed within 2 months after the training. According to the OPAL-survey, 82% of participants were satisfied with the training. The benefits are in the line with the expectation. Naturally the employability could be higher and the instrument cannot equally serve all the groups, but in principle, it has helped the unemployed to find employment. There are no reports of unexpected benefits or cost. The cost control is quite good and it is limited by the budget. The satisfaction of the participants indicated that the benefits exceed the improved employability.

There is no evidence so far. An unexpected benefit has been that teachers have used the outcomes of the process to inform the planning of their courses. To keep within the constraints of funding, the use of modern digital tools like big data has had to be limited.