LETS TALK ABOUT NORDPLUS

The project A Lifetime of Learning: Mapping Competence Development in the Workplace NPAD-2025/10300, funded by the Nordic Council of MInistry  is an ongoing Nordplus project. Duration time 09/2025 - 08/2027.

This project brings together partners from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden to map learning methodologies in workplace settings, focusing on the healthcare and technology sectors. By identifying and analysing real-world cases, the project aims to document how skills are developed in work environments, both through partnerships with educational institutions and through internal training developed by the organisation itself. The findings will provide insights into best practices, trends, and effective learning methods that can be adopted across the Nordic region.

The project is particularly relevant given current challenges such as labour and skills shortages caused by ageing populations and rapidly evolving job requirements. By exploring work-based learning models, the project seeks to document workforce adaptability and productivity andto share this knowledge. Through structured interviews, workshops, and conferences, the team will collect and compare data across the five countries. Results will be disseminated through webinars, reports, and a final publication, ensuring that findings are accessible to policymakers, businesses, and educational institutions.

Project aim
In “A Lifetime of Learning: Mapping methods of competence development in the workplace”, we bring together partners from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden to document learning methods developed and implemented in the workplace. We will focus on the healthcare and technology sectors. These sectors are broad to allow for the selection of target groups during the initial stages of the project.

The project is a mapping initiative across the five Nordic countries, aiming to identify examples of competence development methods where the workplace is the primary learning arena.

Each partner will identify and document cases in the specified sectors. These will be analysed and used to identify trends. This will give us insight into how learning occurs in the workplace within healthcare and technology, which can then be disseminated through our respective networks. The project will aim to map transferable knowledge that is useful across sectors and national borders.

Background
The Nordic countries face challenges due to ageing populations, declining birth rates, and shortages of both labour and competencies. Up-skilling and re-skilling workers through workplace learning is crucial to retaining talent, increasing productivity, and filling skills gaps. The need for lifelong learning (skills, knowledge, and attitudes) is prevalent in the healthcare and technology sectors. These two sectors are experiencing labour and skills shortages across the Nordics and internationally. Therefore, maintaining productive workplaces while simultaneously ensuring high-quality skills development is essential. Learning and competence development in the workplace can no longer be something that only large multinational workplaces invest in.

In the technology sector, changes happen faster than skills can be developed. In healthcare, we do not have enough personnel to cover the population’s needs. We believe, however, that training, suitable methods for competence development, and education are key to addressing these challenges. Ensuring that suitable methods for work-based learning are high-quality, effective, and well integrated will help employees gain the necessary skills while remaining productive.

Nordic/Baltic added value
This project builds on the NordPlus priority of lifelong learning and the tradition of Nordic cooperation projects, enabling cross-border learning and the exchange of practice.

The countries in this project have, to a high degree, similar societal structures and face similar labour and skills shortages. There are also similarities in political and societal dialogue around the need for lifelong learning and how significant the workplace is as a learning arena. There is also extensive pre-existing cross-border business and cooperation. Our previous experiences show that the Nordic countries have such close relations, both formal and informal, that it is possible to identify trends in work-based learning and training that are relevant across national borders.

Defining effective and sustainable learning methods in the workplace, with quality as a central factor, will facilitate a transnational exchange of experiences, promising practices, and valuable knowledge.

Activities
The project team will have five physical working meetings during the project’s lifetime. At each meeting, the partners will coordinate the mapping and analysis of findings. As soon as we have the first intermediate results from our investigations, expected after three months, we will arrange workshops or conferences directly connected to the meetings to disseminate the results and create a dialogue (quality control) concerning the identified experiences with key stakeholders that we identify during the scoping phase of the project.

Webinars will be arranged between the meetings to broaden the dialogue about the learning methods and discuss the project experiences. Before, between, and after the meetings and seminars, partners’ experiences from previous Nordic projects and collected experience will be incorporated into the project website, containing Nordic Network for Lifelong Learning (NLL) webpage blogs, descriptions, analyses, and the final publication. For the preparation and marketing of the seminars, 8–10 webinars will be held and recorded, allowing asynchronous access to the material, projects, and experiences.