One Centralised Solution Helped the City of Helsinki Increase Learning Engagement

The City of Helsinki is the largest employer in Finland, with 38,000 employees. The guiding principle of the City Strategy is that Helsinki is a place of growth. Therefore, Helsinki aims to be an attractive employer offering various exciting career opportunities, and the city encourages continuous learning, work rotation, and the development of diverse career paths.

The City of Helsinki strategically focuses on skills development to meet future service needs. Consequently, there is an increasing need for ongoing skill development on the job. At the same time, the digitalisation of public services creates constant pressure to keep skills and competencies up to date while simultaneously performing the work. Therefore, continuous investment in skills is necessary for staff to make the most of the digital opportunities that the city presents.

Photo: Jussi Hellsten / Helsinki Partners

City of Helsinki had a problem: They needed a single, flexible solution for upskilling

The City of Helsinki needed a flexible solution to provide learning and development across the organisation to support growth. The largest divisions are Education, Social Services, and Healthcare and Rescue Services. “We deliver training to many learners with a wide variety of job roles, different training needs, diverse backgrounds, and learning preferences. Therefore, every division has its learning requirements,” explained Ilkka Eerola, Development Manager at the City of Helsinki.

Previously, every division had its own digital learning solutions, which created inefficiencies, as many of these solutions were used for similar needs and requirements. In 2020, the City of Helsinki decided to build a centrally managed learning solution to meet all the requirements across the divisions and the Central Administration. The goal was to move from multiple platforms to one centralised solution to provide all employees with an optimal learning journey in the most cost-efficient way.

Photo: Jussi Hellsten / Helsinki Partners

Valamis’ Complete Learning Platform offered one centralised solution

The City of Helsinki focused on key requirements and needs across all divisions and the Central Administration to find the right learning solution. The goal was to find a SaaS platform vendor who would become a long-term strategic partner to support successful implementation and platform use with a skilled services team. In addition, mobile-first user experience was a key requirement.

They evaluated several learning platforms based on a public tendering and procurement process. The public tender included system requirements and some additional requirements. The Valamis platform met all the requirements. As a result, Valamis was selected as it met all the complex requirements of the City of Helsinki.

“We created a network of main platform users to lead the learning platform implementation in our organisation; every division and organisation unit has their main user leading the gradual rollout. At the same time, the City of Helsinki has been reviewing and improving internal processes to give all employees easy access to training whenever needed. This work is still ongoing.”

Ilkka Eerola, Development Manager at the City of Helsinki

One key benefit of having the centralised learning platform for the Helsinki team is employee onboarding. They are improving the onboarding processes and moving a large share of onboarding tasks to online across the organisation. In addition to offering high-quality onboarding, this will create efficiencies and cost savings over time.

“The Valamis team has been great at helping us define new processes. In addition, we have a committed and highly skilled Solution Manager who helps us to get the most out of the system for our specific use cases. The Solution Manager has helped us solve various technical challenges and improve the usability of the platform and learning content delivery. They are also very responsive and listens to our feedback. They have also added features to the product roadmap based on our requirements.”

Nina Suursalmi, Project Manager at the City of Helsinki

Now the focus is on increasing the user numbers and platform usage by offering a wide variety of engaging learning content on different topics and improving learning content creation processes.

“Usability is critical, and the Valamis platform is relatively easy-to-use and flexible, so it can be adapted to support our learning processes. We are implementing a distributed content creation model and are now creating guidelines for content production across the whole organization. As the City of Helsinki aims to increase employee well-being and job satisfaction, we are launching a large amount of new content around that topic.

“Besides our own content, we provide our learners with content from third-party vendors. It has been straightforward to integrate third-party content into the Valamis platform. We are looking forward to using the Valamis integration with Microsoft Teams to give our employees quick access to learning content in the flow of work.” continued Suursalmi.

The results showed a significant increase in learner engagement

Photo: Jussi Hellsten / Helsinki Partners

Since the City of Helsinki implemented Valamis, they have seen a significant increase in learner engagement. In the past few months, the learning platform usage has more than doubled and is expected to grow steadily over time when new learning content is being added to the platform.

“Digital and blended learning will be a significant focus in the coming years. The entire learning offering will be integrated into one learning solution. The Valamis platform offers efficient analytics tools to monitor the increase in learner engagement in our different divisions. Based on the data, we will also optimize and tailor our learning content offering to ensure that the content is always relevant for our learners.

“The centralised learning delivery generates cost and time savings. The learning platform allows us to keep the training quality consistent across the organisation. All employees will have easy access to learning content on any device at any time,” explained Eerola.

“Valamis has been helping us to streamline the online learning processes, content delivery and reporting. We can always count on the Valamis team to brainstorm and explore together new ways to use the system. Valamis also has exciting plans, and the product roadmap has plenty of interesting features. We are keen to test new features as soon as they become available.”

Ilkka Eerola, Development Manager at the City of Helsinki