Challenges Addressed
- Blended counselling
- Exchange and knowledge transfer (among educational professionals, guidance counsellors, etc.)
- Facilitation of transition from school education to career selection
- Improve matching between skills and jobs
- Improvement of guidance/ employment services
- Increase the interaction between schools and professional life
- Increase the mobility of people in Europe for education and employment purposes
- Promote self-assessment
- Provision of low-threshold information on educational guidance to disadvantaged adult populations
- Raise awareness on guidance
- Reduce early school leaving
- Support those wishing to re-enter the labour market
- Tackling unemployment
- Target unemployment
Arbetsförmedlingen is used by jobseekers, employers and guidance practitioners and aims to facilitate the effectiveness and efficiency of the labour market in multiple ways.
The digitization process of PES has made the largest part of the agency’s services available online, and Arbetsförmedlingen is fully embedded in PES’s operations.
Arbetsförmedlingen offers various ICT tools:
- Job Bank;
- Webinars;
- Podcasts;
- Personal web meetings;
- Self-registration and appointment scheduling;
- Online Tests (Choose a Profession, Interest Test, Future and Career, Self-estimation of skills);
- Career Compass;
- Occupations A-Z;
- Videos;
- CV Database.
Policy objectives
- Access to Lifelong Guidance Services
- Assessing the effectiveness of Lifelong Guidance Provision
- Assuring the quality of Lifelong Guidance Provision
- Career Management Skills
- Contributing the rise of mobility of people in Europe for education and employment purposes
- Funding Lifelong Guidance Services
- ICT in Lifelong Guidance
- Improving careers information
- Improving employability and supporting older workers
- Interactive online tools
- Raising the skills and qualifications of adults
- Raising the skills and qualifications of young people
- Strategic Leadership
- Supporting people at risk and disadvantaged groups
- Training and Qualifications of Guidance Practitioners
INNOVATIVE ASPECTS OF LMI
- Blended counselling
- Creation of ePortfolios with students' skills and competences
- Crowed sourcing of expert knowledge on educational guidance
- Customisation of LMI through the users' adaptation according to their needs
- Data entered by end-users
- Effective job matching
- Guidance methods
- Informal LMI
- Innovative user profiling
- Interoperability with job-search engines
- Life course related filtering of LMI
- Matching of regional education to labour market
- News relevant to educational guidance
- Occupational information
- One-stop-shop
- Personalised educational advice
- Provision of additional information on the awards not available elsewhere, to make it easily understood to employers and institutions in other countries
- Provision of external links to available EC employment, guidance and educational services
- Real time LMI
- Scientific research on guidance
- Thematic compilation of third party LMI
Labour Market Information is the heart of Arbetsförmedlingen, facilitated through the use of ICT: 
- Job Bank: pool of 80 000 vacancies, connected with businesses so as to automatically transfer job advertisements;
- The Webinars: guidance on CV writing, use of social media in job searching, interview prep, etc.
- The Podcasts: aim to enhance the competences and skills of the jobseekers;
- The Career Compass: labour market forecasts, demonstrating the prospects of 200 occupations;
- The Occupations A-Z tool: LMI data from the Swedish Statistics and from experts within trade unions;
- The CV Database: information on the profiles of people who seek employment in Sweden and effective matching in the Swedish labour market;
- The PES Videos: descriptions of occupations and other LMI, including CMS that aim to increase the employability potential of jobseekers.
Much of the LMI provided is produced in-house, by the Analysis Department. The main external sources of LMI stems from: employers, jobseekers, trade unions, the Swedish Bureau of Statistics, HEIs and public sources of statistics and reports.
INNOVATIVE USE OF ICT
- Combination with offline elements
- Connection with third parties (LMI, PES, etc.)
- Customized RSS feed
- Dynamic interconnection of electronic resources according to a life course approach
- e-portfolio
- Interactive online tools
- Mobile app
- Online counselling
- Online wiki
- Open source
- Personalised information storage
- Quick diagnosis tool
- Social media utilisation
- Arbetsförmedlingen provides information and assistance via simple and mainstream software that allows the online provision of services;
- The use of the ICT tools does not require specific skills from the users. However, PES practitioners are offered training on the ICT tools of Arbetsförmedlingen;
- Tools are also available also via mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets;
- In Several APIs have been developed to ease the access of other organisations to the data and information available.
Results and impacts obtained
From numerical aspect, in 2015 the practice had more than 4.4 million monthly users and around 1.8 million unique visitors per month.
From qualitative perspective, Arbetsförmedlingen has had some impact on youth unemployment and the proportion of newly arrived people who entered work life or education increased in 2015. The practice also affected the performance and work process of PES practitioners, as it enabled the agency’s practitioners to have more free time to deal with new needs that emerge.
Evaluation process: jobseekers’ and employers’ satisfaction surveys; PES also compares the results of these assessments to results of other delivery methods (face-to-face and telephone).
- The management model;
- The gradual –small step- progress of digitization;
- The service design process is user-centric and the LMI provision is based on user needs;
- The ICT tools have an informal character, are modern and easy to use;
- Emphasis is placed on the provision of CMS;
- The quality of guidance and LMI provided as well as the methodologies that are implemented for the development of the tools;
- The engagement of several different stakeholders in the development and provision of LMI;
- The constant financial support from the Government.
- Difficulty in measuring customer satisfaction.
- Not all users adequately informed.
- Complex information.
- Low response rates might jeopardize the proper function of the forecasts.
- ICT tools do not reckon unpublished jobs thus they do not appear on the Job Bank tool.
- Higher level of integration of educational paths with vocational paths.
- Agency's need for a common ground and a reference point for future ICT developments.
Transferability elements
Arbetsförmedlingen is highly compatible with the structure of the Swedish LLG system, as it has become fully integrated in the service delivery channels of PES, which is one of the key actors of the Swedish LLG system.
The annual budget of the Digital Services Department, responsible for the development and maintenance of the PES e-services, is SEK 132 billion which comprises of SEK 112 million for maintenance and SEK 20 million for investment costs.
- The responsible department had 95 employees in 2016 across six units, all structured in a similar way.
- The LMI produced internally by the PES Department of Analysis, comprising of economists, political scientists, statisticians and staff with other educational background.
- Many employees hold PhD titles and have strong research experience.
- PES guidance practitioners go through intensive in-service training, designed as gradual and blended learning and offered via physical and online training courses.
- Availability of platform for mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets.
- Development of APIs to ease access of organisations to PES data and information.
- A high level of digital literacy with the development of web, mobile and social media applications and awareness of service design is required from the staff. Users and practitioners don’t need high digital skills.
Cooperation of the agency with its stakeholders is crucial for the agency’s goal of providing meaningful and up-to-date LMI and quality guidance services.
- Modernisation and unification of the agency’s ICT systems;
- More ICT and LMI tools and additional e-services by other organisations that will take advantage of the PES open data policy;
- New data exploitation ways that will offer a better understanding of different target groups and will lead to higher customization of the e-services and to an improvement of the labour market’s matching efficiency;
- Stronger investment in marketing campaigns for the outreach of the practice to employers and external practitioners;
- Modernisation of survey techniques that are used for the job forecasts.