Swedish agencies collaborate to build data infrastructure for skills supply

The Government Data Summit in London is fast approaching and among the panellists discussing responsible data sharing is Maria Dalhage, Senior Project Manager from the Swedish Public Employment Service. 

Several Swedish agencies, including the Swedish Public Employment Service, the Swedish National Agency for Education, and the Swedish Agency for Higher Vocational Education, have been tasked with making education and labour market data and digital information readily available. Their goal is to establish a comprehensive data infrastructure for skills supply and lifelong learning that will facilitate the transition in the labour market and promote lifelong learning.

The agencies are currently working on developing common concepts and translation keys between existing classification systems for competencies and competency requirements - facilitating the development of services for validation, matching, and guidance. They are also creating secure methods for individuals to share relevant data and information about their competencies with public authorities and other external actors. Alongside this, they are developing a national database for publicly funded education and strengthening the data infrastructure for lifelong learning by creating a qualification database.

Dalhage, who is one of the project managers, reflects on the ongoing government assignment and experiences gained from her own agency's transformation. 

Data collaboration on job ads 

The Swedish Public Employment Service established Jobtech Development five years ago to explore the possibilities of collaborating on open data, APIs, and open source. The project involved testing new business models and collaboration forms.

Dalhage believes that working with data sharing and the sharing of other digital resources is a critical part of digital transformation that requires dialogue and culture, just as much as interoperability. “Data sharing and collaboration will not happen by themselves, they need to be managed in a community-driven approach. There is a lot to learn from Open source projects.”

Dalhage also emphasises the importance of involving the private sector in the data infrastructure since their data is necessary to get a complete picture. “The successful collaboration between the Swedish Public Employment Service and private job boards increased the number of job ads on the public national job board by 30%,  and at the same time increased the private job boards traffic.”

Dalhage identifies four success criteria for data sharing between public and private sectors: making it easy to share data, respecting private actors' business models, designing for contribution, and sharing digital resources and results on a common platform.

The ecosystem prioritises back-to-site sharing, and all data is treated as open data to encourage collaboration and reusability.

"We need to include the private sector in our ecosystem and infrastructure. Our collaboration on job ads is one success story, but we need many mors,” Dalhage says 

On the https://jobtechdev.se platform, APIs, datasets, standards, and open-source code are freely accessible for anyone to use. 

All Swedish open data can be found on https://dataportal.se