Academic Work opens up completely new educational opportunities

For a few months now, Academic Work has been a member of Compare. The path to a fixed point in Värmland has gone through both Örebro and Gothenburg, but since 2013 there has been a permanent organization in place in Karlstad.

At first, however, it only consisted of a salesperson and the office manager Olivia Jutered.

- Since then, we have grown quite strongly, now we are eleven people on site. There is a lot of potential in Värmland and we want to help companies find the right skills, says Olivia Jutered, who comes from Umeå, studied in Karlstad and returned here when the opportunity arose at Academic Work.

Olivia Jutered feels at home in Karlstad, and Academic Works' operations in Värmland have slowly but surely grown in scope.

The fact that it finally became a Karlstad office, says Olivia Jutered, is due to the fact that there are people in the company who were passionate about establishing an establishment in the region. In terms of business, it has also proved successful, there are currently around 80 Academic Work consultants deployed in the county.

The demand for consultants is greatest in the technology sector, followed by IT. On the other hand, the percentage of consultants in finance is somewhat lower than in other parts of the country.

- It is clear that it is a bigger challenge to find programmers than administrators, but we are also experts in finding the right workforce with the help of our networks, says Olivia Jutered.

On the marketing side, almost all resources are therefore used for activities and collaborations aimed at Karlstad University. Incidentally, Academic Work is only a stone's throw away from its office opposite the university's bus stop.

The connection to Karlstad may become even more concrete in the coming years. According to Mattis Varén, education specialist at the Academy who is responsible for the education branch, it is not impossible that a consultant training will be placed in place in the future.

- The educational location itself does not limit us. We always recruit locally, even if the training normally takes place in Kista. But we have had training courses outsourced in the past, for example to Sundsvall and Borlänge. If there is a local need, we try to solve it, and there we also see Compare as a good party to discuss educational opportunities with, says Mattias Varén.

A more structural innovation is that the Academy is also reviewing the possibility of continuing education aimed directly at companies, which would violate the business model of only hiring out consultants. In Compare's competence mapping Digital Revolt four out of ten member companies state that they lack training in today's offer.

- We see a very large demand for corporate training, so the goal is to initiate a first program in 2020. But the plans are still in their infancy, says Mattias Varén.

In that case, the offer would probably be aimed at courses that are already found in the Academy's current training courses, for example Java, C#.Net, Salesforce and ServiceNow, according to Mattias Varén.

Finally, you have a slightly different niche than Compare's other member companies. What do you hope to get out of the collaboration?

- I think it can be a win-win! Compare is a strong network and we hope to find joint solutions on how to solve knowledge challenges. We work a lot "peer to peer" and believe that you can learn a lot from each other.