100 percent proud and competent

Every employee in our department of the municipality has the possibility to have a full time employment since the beginning of this year. Before we had a lot of part-time employees and this was economically beneficial for the municipality, because the administration could use just the right number of employees during peak labour hours.

The outcome of this opportunity for the employees is that we have increased the number of fixed full-time posts with more than 20%. One of the purposes of the project is to make this “over-employment” more flexible end efficient in its use so that the number of temporary posts will be reduced.

We want to make a learning environment and skills development so that the employees can be more flexible and work for each other in the organization. We think this makes the jobs more attractive and the costs for our department can be limited. We also think it is very important to do this because, if want to get personnel in to the caring sector, we need to get more attractive working conditions and the possibility for every care-worker to be able to live on their salary.

We will try to motivate the participants by addressing their specific needs in overcoming barriers to develop their skills. Through a relatively wide range of training options we will also provide participants in the project opportunities to gain new skills. This training will be given to our whole work-force and is estimated to include a minimum of four days – as an average.

In our organization only 5 % of the working force is male. We also think it is essential to get more males in the working force and interested in the caring sector. We are very interested in different methods to achieve this objective. We think that this full-time employment at least is a step forward.

As we know that it is common to many European countries that they have an aging population, which in turn requires more care, leading to greater pressure on the staff. We think it would be very interesting to learn more about the situation in different countries and how they connect to this new challenge.