Finland, the best place to study… and work

This post is also available in: Spanish

It is enough to do a search in the Internet with the term “Finland education system” to get lots of links (here a random example) highlighting the success of the Finnish system of education, with 98% of free public colleges and a 0,2% school drop-out rate.

Once sorting out education, the next target in Finland is working life.

Days ago I read the Finnish National Working Life Development Strategy to 2020. It did not took me so much as it is only 23 pages long, the pages that the Land of thousand lakes needs to explain the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) how they will do to become the best place to work in Europe by 2020.

In order to meet such excellence, Finland establishes that all the organizations in the country will follow a development path in three stages:

  1. Each Finnish organization (enterprises, bodies,…) will establish a good basic level with high-level standards which will be considered as the to start working.
  2. Before moving on to the level of developer.
  3. And thereafter, forerunner. in which excellence is met with world-class products, services, operational concepts, workplace communities and their continuous development.

National and regional actors, services providers, industries and industrial federations and the society itself will support the resources to each workplace to carry out its development path.

An extensive national cooperation project -with specific projects- will implement the working life development strategy.

finlandIf “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication“, to write a national strategy in 23 official pages is as simply and sophisticated as if one Finnish should have traveled to the future and now explains us the plan, without needing to give excessive details, which inspires such confidence that, at this point, I am sure that Finland will be by 2020 the best place in Europe to study… and work.