The Act abolishing adult education allowance has come into effect on 1 June 2024. In order to be eligible for adult education allowance, both your studies and your period of support must have started by 31 July 2024 at the latest. Read more on News concerning the adult education allowance -page.
For us in Employment Fund, digital service production is the starting point. Public digital services must also be reliable, efficient and modern. As a relatively small actor, it has been necessary for us to be innovative and resource-efficient. We have actively seized new opportunities and dared to reform our basic processes to enable the efficient utilisation of digitalisation. Examples of the largest reforms include the introduction of the Incomes Register in unemployment insurance contribution processes and the increase in the level of automation applicable to adult education benefits.
In January 2019, we were among the first to adopt the national, centralised Incomes Register to invoice unemployment insurance contributions. When the Incomes Register was introduced, it was important for us to make the payments as automatic and timely as possible, which would ease the administrative burden on employers who pay unemployment insurance contributions. As a result, we were able to automate invoicing almost completely, which means that the employer no longer needs to actively use our services. Instead, the unemployment insurance contribution invoice is automatically submitted based on the information recorded in the Incomes Register.
The change in legislation on adult education allowances a few years ago significantly increased the number of allowance decisions issued annually. Without automation, the change would have necessitated a significant number of new personnel. We decided to take a different approach and created a vision that seemed impossible at the time: “a decision in a day, payment in two days.” We then started planning the automation of the process in a goal-oriented manner. Today, we process approximately 85% of payment applications automatically. The highly automated processes will also be an invaluable aid during the transition period for the abolition of adult education benefits, as the number of applications is gradually decreasing, but we must be ready to process them until spring 2026.
Customer satisfaction is close to our hearts and at the core of the Employment Fund’s strategy. In the development of IT services, this means, among other things, that the user perspective is taken into account from the very start of every development project. This attitude is also very noticeable in the way our personnel thinks. Even more informal discussions often refer to the customer experience and the fact that the personnel really want to invest in it.
According to our continuous monitoring, an average of 84% of our customers were satisfied with our services in the first half of this year. There are still development needs in the online service for unemployment insurance contributions, which is why we have launched an overall reform of the online service utilising service design methods.
“In accordance with our customer strategy, the aim is to ensure that our services are as easy to use as possible. Employer customers have several different transaction roles, so service design is needed from the first steps on the service path. We also want to make the service genuinely accessible to different user groups,” explains Tuulikki Saari, Customer Relations Director.
Another one of our goals is to serve the Fund’s personnel as well as possible. We invest in ensuring that the tools and systems are functional, and that working is smooth.
The purpose of Employment Fund’s Technology and Development service area is to ensure that all systems, applications and other tools available to us are efficient, safe and easy to use. As a responsible user of public funds, we strive to make the most out of ready-made platforms.
“Today, ready-made solutions for a wide range of needs are available on the market. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we strive to use ready-made solutions smartly. Automation solutions for both unemployment insurance contribution services and allowances are largely based on ready-made platform solutions. We only tailor specific details related to the operations of Employment Fund,” says Virpi Halme, Technology and Development Director.
In addition to using agile methods, we have paid a great deal of attention to the structures and operating methods of project management to meet the deadlines and other requirements imposed on us as a public actor, arising from legislation. In general, the importance of IT services and IT expertise in the implementation of our statutory tasks has increased year by year. Competence in procurements and supplier guidance is also needed. In recent years, we have recruited new experts and trained our existing personnel.
We have consistently developed digital services in the past few years. Of course, this does not mean that the digitalisation of the fund is, or will ever be, fully complete. Continuous development is a basic precondition for keeping services up to date and responding to technical requirements and changing customer needs in the future.
