Continuous Learning Funding in Finland 2026: JOTPA After the Allowance Cut

The allowance is gone. Who pays now?

For a long time, a Finnish nurse or engineer who wanted a mid-career qualification had a fairly simple deal. Take study leave, apply for the adult education allowance (aikuiskoulutustuki), and have part of your lost salary replaced while you studied. Plenty of providers built product lines around that flow of self-directed adult learners.

That deal is over. The Orpo government abolished the allowance, along with the vocational qualification stipend and job alternation leave. Studies had to start by 31 July 2024 to qualify, and the last allowance payments ran out at the end of 2025. The government's own estimate was that scrapping the allowance would strengthen employment by about 10,000 person-years, which tells you how it saw the scheme: as something that kept people away from work, not as an investment in skills.

So who pays for a 45-year-old's retraining in 2026? Three parties, in roughly this order: the employer, JOTPA (the Service Centre for Continuous Learning and Employment), and the learner. (Degree places and vocational qualifications are still state-funded, but that money flows to licensed institutions through their core funding, not to the open training market.) If you sell training into Finland, that ordering matters more than any budget line. This post spends most of its time on JOTPA, because its rules can be learned. Employers are where most of the revenue is.

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JOTPA in numbers

JOTPA's operating appropriation in the 2026 budget is €21,352,000. The government's 2027 budget proposal has €21,310,000, a cut of €42,000 that barely registers. The budget expects about €20m of the 2027 line to go out as transfers, with the rest covering running costs. That €20m is, roughly, the pot training providers compete for.

Now the small print. Up to €10m of the 2027 line may go to the study-while-working pilot. The 2025 and 2026 budgets earmarked a flat €10m a year for it, and 2027 turns that into a ceiling. If the pilot takes most of it, the money left for JOTPA's regular themed calls is closer to €10m than €20m. Plan on the smaller number.

Then there's the line almost nobody outside the ministry watches: the separate appropriation for continuous learning and competence development. It was €15.8m in the 2025 final accounts. In 2026 it's €2.86m, and the 2027 proposal is €2.82m. That's a fall of about 82% in two years, and only around €900,000 of what's left is expected to go out as transfers.

Finally, the cumulative scoreboard. JOTPA's funding page reports roughly €93m awarded in discretionary government grants and about €36m in procurement contracts. Grants have outweighed procurements by more than two and a half to one. Keep that ratio in mind, because the bigger door is the one most private training firms can't walk through.

Grants or procurement: which door is yours?

JOTPA spends through two instruments, and the eligibility rules split the market cleanly.

Discretionary government grants (valtionavustukset) are open only to vocational education providers, liberal adult education providers and higher-education institutions, plus consortia of those. A training company without a vocational or higher-education licence can't hold one. Your realistic route is partnering with a university of applied sciences or vocational provider that does, and supplying content or trainers where the call allows it. The grant, the reporting and most of the margin stay with the institution.

Procurements (hankinnat) work differently. JOTPA says any private-law entity can bid: companies, universities and their subsidiaries, private education providers, municipally owned training companies. What it buys is training that is mainly new and not part of existing qualifications. It explicitly won't procure vocational qualifications or parts of them, personnel training, single-company in-house training or labour-market training for jobseekers. And the training has to be free for learners, because JOTPA is paying. JOTPA's own procurement page spells out the longer game: providers develop new content that they can later build into qualifications or run as paid training.

That exclusion list is the most useful paragraph on JOTPA's site. It tells you JOTPA won't buy your existing catalogue. It wants a course you probably haven't built yet, in a theme it picked, for learners from many employers at once.

Here's how the routes compare as of late September 2026:

A word on timing. JOTPA's 2026 calendar, released on 9 December 2025, pencilled in procurements on health technology (January), industrial energy efficiency (February), semiconductors (May; offers closed on 28 August), biodiversity (September) and sales and commerce digitalisation (October). By the procurement page's 9 September 2026 update, those first slots read February and March, biodiversity had slid to October, and the sales procurement wasn't listed. The calendar is a forecast. Treat it like one.

How a €1.5 million robotics tender became 560 learners

The industrial-robotics procurement for SMEs is the cleanest example of how a single JOTPA tender turns into a year of work, so it's worth walking through.

JOTPA held an information session on 18 December 2025. Offers were due at 4pm on 14 January 2026, less than four weeks later, with the holidays in between. The budget was €1.5m, split into five areas: robotics fundamentals, collaborative robots, welding robotics, robot safety, and robotics procurement for SMEs. JOTPA said it would pick three providers each for the first and last areas and two each for the middle three, which makes twelve contract slots. Training had to be designed so learners could complete it mostly alongside their jobs. And, in one short sentence that should worry every bidder, recruiting the learners was the provider's responsibility.

By 19 March 2026, JOTPA was announcing training starting for 560 learners, with delivery running from 15 February 2026 to 1 March 2027.

Now picture a 12-person automation training firm in Tampere that won a collaborative-robotics slot. It didn't win €1.5m. Divide the pot evenly across twelve slots (JOTPA didn't publish the split, so this is only an average) and a winner is looking at something like €125,000 for 45 or so learners over roughly a year, or about €2,700 a head. Decent money for a firm that size. But it also has to market free training to small manufacturers who've never heard of it and keep them enrolled while they work full shifts.

The firms that do well here already own a recruitment channel: a robot integrator's customer list, an industry association's newsletter, a welding-equipment dealer who'll mention the course on site visits. Name that channel in your offer. And count what the contract gives you beyond the fee. Every SME whose staff spent a year learning from you is a warm lead for the company-specific training JOTPA won't pay for.

Who else bids? In JOTPA's €2m digital and omnichannel commerce procurement back in 2023, the chosen providers included Aava Bang Oy, Y4 Works Oy (picked in three of the four areas), Hyria Business Institute Oy, TechClass Oy and Yrkeshögskolan Novia, a Swedish-language university of applied sciences. Companies and a university on one list, competing on the same terms.

What the study-while-working pilots taught universities

The study-while-working pilot is the closest thing Finland has to a replacement for the allowance. When the €10m first appeared, in the government's 2025 budget proposal, it was booked under a blunt label: the system replacing the adult education allowance. Its stated goal is to strengthen employers' role in their staff's continuous learning, so people can keep working while they build new skills.

The rounds so far:

• First round, announced 24 March 2025: about €3.9m in aid from €6.3m requested, going to 21 training providers in 18 projects, with more than 70 employers and 737 students. The University of Jyväskylä got €520,000 to train 100 early-childhood teachers, a Laurea UAS consortium got €665,600 for 115 sosionomi (social services) students, and Lapland UAS got €312,000 for 60 nurses.
• Second round, announced 10 October 2025: around €1.3m for seven projects and 256 students, including €364,000 to the University of Jyväskylä for 70 early-childhood special education teachers.
• Third round: a rolling call from 29 September 2025 to 30 June 2026, with about €4.5m available and decisions aimed for within about a week to ten days of each application. It has now closed.

Three lessons stand out. First, this is money for degrees and formal qualifications in care and education, mostly nursing, social services and early-childhood teaching, not short courses. Second, first-round demand beat supply by about 60%. Third, look at the third-round terms: a maximum of €5,200 per target student, and at least 60% of each grant passed on to employers as compensation. On a full €5,200, that's at least €3,120 to the employer and at most €2,080 left for the institution. The pilot is, in effect, an employer subsidy routed through education providers.

For EdTech vendors, that's where the opening sits. Institutions running these pilots have to schedule teaching around shift work, coordinate placements with employers and track progress for people who are rarely on campus. Those are software and service problems, and the budget for them comes from the institution's slice, which is small. Price accordingly.

Is the new study voucher adult-learning money?

No. And this is where a lot of providers are going to get it wrong.

The 2027 budget proposal includes €18.6m for an open UAS and open university study-voucher pilot. On paper it looks like the first new adult-learning money in years. The budget's own explanation says otherwise: the voucher's aim is to support and speed up young people's transition into higher education. It sits in the higher-education line, next to €75m for the LUMI AI factory, not in either continuous-learning line.

The ministry's total for 2027 rises by about €200m to roughly €9.2bn. Very little of that is aimed at working adults. The adult-education number you'll see quoted, €181.6m for liberal adult education, funds folk high schools and adult education centres, a different market altogether. Vocational education loses €15m, a cut the ministry ties to new tuition fees for students from outside the EU and EEA.

So if you're planning a mid-career open-university product around voucher-funded learners, stop. We haven't seen detailed eligibility rules, and the proposal went to Parliament on 21 September 2026, so nothing is final. But the stated purpose is young people, and pilots tend to be judged on their stated purpose. If you're an open university, the voucher is real business. It just isn't the adult business.

Selling to employers in a 10% unemployment economy

Statistics Finland put trend unemployment at 10.1% in August 2026. That cuts both ways. Employers can hire more easily, so the case for retraining existing staff is harder to make than when engineers were fielding several offers. But budgets are tight, and the skills gaps in automation, data and care haven't closed.

A few things change when the employer, not the learner, is your customer:

• Few people can take a year off now. Build for study alongside work, in short modules, which is how JOTPA writes its own tenders too.
• The buyer is an HR or operations lead with a spreadsheet. Price against the cost of an unfilled role or a failed automation project, not another provider's day rate.
• Use free JOTPA places as the top of your funnel and sell the company-specific follow-on separately, since JOTPA won't fund single-company training.
• If you train jobseekers, your buyer changed on 1 January 2025. Public employment services now sit with 45 municipal employment areas rather than the state, and four of them (Helsinki, Vantaa, Lahti and Kouvola) run services themselves.

If you run a Finnish training business, here's what we'd do before Christmas. Give one person ownership of JOTPA, and if the agency follows last year's pattern, have them ready for the 2027 themes around December. Pick two themes where you already have the content and a recruitment channel, and ignore the rest. Line up a UAS partner for grant work. Then put most of your sales effort into employers. The allowance used to let learners choose their own training. Now someone else chooses for them, and your product has to be something that person would sign off on.