Designing career services for Rastor-instituutti

Career planning skills play an important role throughout our careers, both in transitions and in growth. Career planning helps us build a seamless, coherent professional identity. A significant part of this is an individual process through which we connect with our work and develop our skills and capacity for continuous learning.

In the future, people will hold several different jobs and roles at the same time, requiring them to develop their skills and renew themselves throughout their lives. We can expect career transitions to become more frequent and the content of work to continue changing.

Supporting career planning and career readiness is an important part of Rastor-instituutti’s work. To respond to the changing needs of its student clients, Rastor-instituutti set out to co-create up-to-date career services with staff and clients, led by Kuulas.

"At Rastor-instituutti, we want to be the organisation people turn to during career transitions, at career turning points and as part of their career development. Working with Kuulas has been a unique and valuable experience as we have created a guidance model, a new career guidance model and a career partnership mindset within our organisation."

Susanna Valkeus,

Pedagogical Manager, Rastor-instituutti

Project objectives

A significant part of our professional identity is built through dialogue in which career planning skills can help employees along this journey. It is not just a journey outwards, but a journey into ourselves as part of continuous learning and development. The importance of career planning skills cannot be overstated in today’s working life, where the pace of change challenges every one of us to keep renewing ourselves and developing.

Rastor-instituutti wanted to embrace this change and find solutions to support student clients more holistically throughout their careers. Together, we launched a co-design process that we took forward using service design methods, identifying client needs and building effective solutions to meet them.

During the project, career services were piloted with student clients in various formats and developed based on the feedback received. Among other things, the trial sought to establish:

What career-related needs do our clients have, and how could we help?
What added value do the services bring to the student journey?
What delivery format would best support our student clients?
Does the content resonate: do our clients feel that the service we have designed and delivered is needed?
In what direction should the career services offered to students be developed?

Project progress

We began building the model through customer and user insight, aligning it with an understanding of the sector. Development moved forward through guest contributions, benchmarking and ideation workshops. Co-creation continued during a two-month pilot delivered to student clients. Its purpose was to gather the most comprehensive feedback possible on the practices and exercises being tested, which had emerged in the previous phase of the work.

The project produced the Urahuoltamo model, which brings together working-life themes that students and alumni consider important, delivered through individual coaching, group coaching and webinars. Career guidance at Rastor-instituutti took on a new form through digital career coaching, benchmarked against the work of Urasparraajat. This created an entirely unique way of providing and delivering career guidance in an educational setting, receiving excellent feedback from student clients and alumni.

As a result of the collaboration, Rastor-instituutti gained a modern, client-centred way of providing and offering career services that support clients’ identified needs along their career paths. It created a way to accompany student clients throughout their careers.

Overall pilot rating 4.6/5

Feedback collected during the pilot gave it an overall rating of 4.6 (/5).

When participants were asked whether they had gained new ideas and tools to use in their careers, the rating was 4.5/5. Interaction between staff and students received an outstanding 4.9/5.

In their open-ended feedback, respondents described receiving help from Rastor-instituutti’s Urahuoltamo with themes including:

New resources / tools and perspectives (for facing new challenges)
New ideas to clarify their own situation
Help identifying and articulating their strengths
Encouragement, reassurance and support
A brighter outlook on their situation / life

The feedback also highlighted the importance of timely support, which has helped prevent students from discontinuing their studies.

“Urahuoltamo has been absolutely wonderful in my life situation. It has opened up new perspectives, energy, ways of thinking, tips and so on. Studying alone would not have worked; I might have had to discontinue my studies. Urahuoltamo helped me organise my thoughts. Urahuoltamo helped me organise my thoughts and recognise that many things are also going well. I gained a sense of direction for moving forward through change."

Anonymous student feedback

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Kuulas & Co Oy. Kuulas & Co is a design agency and coaching company specialising in organisational development. We help our clients align strategic skills needs with employees’ career and learning aspirations. At the same time, we coach employees to become insightful developers of their own work and workplace communities.