City of Kaarina: The Vuolearning Platform Fulfils the Needs of a Large Organization

The City of Kaarina started using the Vuolearning platform a few years ago, back in 2019. Over the years the platform has become an integral part of the everyday life of the city's employees and it is used for sharing instructions and manuals, training employees, and different projects.

The versatility of the learning platform enables using it for several purposes

Maija Hanhiala, Human Resources Director of the City of Kaarina, has been an active Vuolearning user since it was first implemented in Kaarina back in 2019. And Kristiina Läntinen, Work Wellbeing Coordinator, joined Vuolearning a little later, when she started working for the City of Kaarina about two years ago.

Image: Vesa-Matti Väärä

Onboarding has been moved online

The City of Kaarina's Human Resources Manager Maija Hanhiala says that when Kaarina started implementing online training, it was clear from the beginning that the new e-learning platform would be introduced to the organization gradually, one step at a time.

The first department to start training employees with Vuolearning was the Human Resources department, which started producing onboarding material for the city's supervisors. The onboarding of all supervisors is nowadays carried out with Vuolearning and the system has been found to make the onboarding process more efficient, and it has also received good feedback from the attendees.

A useful observation regarding online onboarding has been that the system can be used for pre-employment onboarding in situations where an employee has requested before starting their contract, whether they could study some material beforehand.

A useful platform for instructions and other materials

Shortly after starting to build their online onboarding content, the employees of Kaarina faced an issue that they were able to solve with Vuolearning.

The City of Kaarina and its neighboring municipalities started to use a new HR and payroll system, and the employees had to be taught to use it. Hanhiala says that they were not entirely satisfied with the instructions provided by the service provider, so they started to produce their own instructions on the Vuolearning platform.

The process of creating the instructions and importing the finished materials on the platform was simple, and soon they had a set of instructions for using the new system that became like a very user-friendly e-manual. In addition to their own employees, they were easily able to distribute the instructions to the neighboring municipalities. And although this resulted in a temporary increase in their platform user number, the user management was handled smoothly and there was flexibility in terms of pricing.

Because of how suitable the platform was found for this purpose, other internal instructional materials have also started to be brought to the platform later on. Especially the sector of Social and Health services has digitalized plenty of their materials that were formerly stored in old paper binders. Their instructions for e.g. medicine calculations and dispensing are now in a significantly more usable format on the Vuolearning platform.

"In Vuolearning, the instructions are laid out like an e-book! It is much more convenient to read the material on this platform and the information is easier to find than having to search for the right file or folder and then browse through a long set of instructions."

The learning platform supports Kaarina's project work

As a third use case for the learning platform in addition to onboarding and distributing instructions, Work Wellbeing Coordinator Kristiina Läntinen mentions a development project that the City of Kaarina is conducting in co-operation with Keva, "Mieli työssä, työ mielessä (Mind at work, work in mind)".

As a highlight of the development project they have created something called the F-pass. The F-pass is a training developed in cooperation with Mehiläinen, that aims to train their supervisor employees regarding work-related mental health challenges.

The F-pass course includes learning to recognize the signs of burnout and mental health challenges, how to prevent them, how to talk about these challenges at an early stage, and how to support returning back to work systematically.

The F-pass is built as a course on the Vuolearning platform and it includes training material and tasks, that make it easy to follow, review, and report the results. This year they are building a new version of the course for a larger target group, that is supposed to cover all employees of the city.

The City of Kaarina has been really pleased with the many use purposes they have found for the Vuolearning platform. The organization uses a large number of systems, and also this, agile and versatile system has been received well with the users.

The best place to learn - Kaarina

The functionalities of Vuolearning met Kaarina's needs

When choosing a learning platform, the City of Kaarina had several needs and wishes that they wanted to be fulfilled. Vuolearning was able to respond to these needs excellently.

User management is simple even in a large organization, and the employees' diverse needs can be taken into account in trainings

The City of Kaarina is an organization with almost 1800 employees, and Hanhiala and Läntinen are grateful that the management of the city's large number of users has been made easy with single sign-on (SSO).

In practice, single sign-on means that the organisation uses the login credentials it already has, for example, for email purposes, and the introduction of a new system does not require the user to remember new credentials and passwords.

Läntinen highlights that because the city's wide range of services, the staff has a very wide diversity in skills, needs and working conditions that need to be taken into account in course production.

The City of Kaarina employs people from a very wide range of sectors and jobs, which means that the target group is likely to be more diverse than in many smaller or more specialized organisations.

"The aim is to make online learning a pleasant experience for every employee, so that it leaves them feeling that they want to participate in trainings in the future as well."

In practice, this means differences in, for example, the participants' job functions, skill levels, level of experience, available time and equipment. These are things that Hanhiala and Läntinen constantly take into account when producing training materials, both in the structure and the content of the materials.

Training materials can be archived effortlessly

Hanhiala brings up the need for archiving course materials in the municipal sector.

It's important to be able to archive the course materials easily, because if an issue comes up, it's important to be able to see what kind of material has been available to the attendees and when.

Vuolearning makes archiving effortless: Administrators can download the course material as a PDF file, which can then be printed or archived electronically. All the editing data is also stored in Vuolearning, which means that the system can also show who has changed what and when.

Online training as an integral part of the everyday work-life in Kaarina

Through the years of cooperation, Vuolearning has established its place in the everyday life of Kaarina's employees.

The system has been well received by the end users, the employees, and there have been no problems or challenges in using it. Hanhiala and Läntinen say that the most important part of the process is to instruct people well on how to get to the platform, and after they are able to do that, it is very simple to use. In Kaarina, they have decided to share a link to the platform in their intranet, through which employees are used to using other systems as well.

They have been pleased to see how Vuolearning has become a regular tool in the daily lives of their employees. The users remember where they can find the materials, use it regularly, and report that they have been using it to check some materials when necessary.

Vuolearning has also become a permanent tool in the daily lives of Hanhiala and Läntinen, who produce training materials and maintain the platform. They have found it simple to update and maintain materials that have been exported to the platform, and maintaining the admin system settings has also been easy.

In the future Hanhiala and Läntinen are planning to utilize Vuolearning even more actively for digitalising materials. They are also hoping that the amount of internal training content producers in their organization will grow with time. All in all, they are certain that online learning will definitely continue to be Kaarina's way of developing their employees.