Introduction

Iris Group’s origins date back to the late nineteenth century, when Sweden’s organised movement for people with visual impairments established a brush-making enterprise to create employment opportunities. Over the past three decades, Iris Group has delivered a wide range of employment, vocational rehabilitation, educational support and career transition services in Sweden.

Through these services, we have worked with people at very different stages of their pathway into, back to, or within working life: people with disabilities, mental health conditions or other complex support needs; people requiring individualised learning support to complete education or training; people who have been unemployed for long periods; and people whose circumstances or work capacity have changed after many years in employment.

We have also worked closely with employers, the Swedish Public Employment Service, municipalities, education and training providers, healthcare services and other stakeholders.

This contribution asks a simple question:

What has this experience taught us about what helps people enter – and remain in – sustainable working life?

Our evidence base combines more than two decades of operational experience, internal operational and quality data, documented participant and employer feedback, fact-checked interviews with practitioners and specialists, anonymised practice cases and relevant external research.

These sources have different evidential strengths. Internal operational data and practice cases are not presented as independent impact evaluations, and professional experience is not treated as equivalent to research evidence. Instead, we use the different sources to identify recurring patterns, test our own experience against external evidence and raise questions for the design of future employability systems.

Our central proposition is:

Future employability systems need to move from organising interventions to organising the person’s pathway to sustainable working life.

For Iris Group, the wider lesson is:

Standardise where this strengthens quality and consistency. Individualise where people’s needs and pathways differ.

Employment systems often focus on which intervention a person should receive.

Our experience suggests that another question is equally important:

Who meets the person – and under what conditions are professionals expected to do their work?

Professional capability in employment support is broad. It may include knowledge of the labour market and employers, disability, learning support, motivation and behavioural change, workplace accommodation, welfare systems and evidence-based approaches such as Supported Employment and Individual Placement and Support (IPS).

Our interviews also highlight capabilities that are more difficult to capture through formal qualification requirements alone.

The ability to build trust. To listen while maintaining direction. To recognise strengths that the person may no longer see in themselves. To understand an employer’s needs. And to know when to follow a method closely and when a situation requires professional judgement.

One practitioner described supporting a jobseeker in his early sixties with extensive experience in welding and assembly. He had begun to believe that his age meant employers would no longer be interested in him.

His practitioner made a different assessment. She believed that he was relatively close to the labour market and invested additional time in his CV, presentation, motivation and interview preparation.

He secured employment – and received two additional job offers.

A single case cannot establish a general effect. But it illustrates a recurring observation from our interviews:

What professionals believe is possible can influence which possibilities are explored.

This practice observation is consistent with findings from the Danish Employment Indicator Project (BIP). BIP followed approximately 4,000 people in vulnerable labour-market positions over four years and generated more than 27,000 progression measurements. Among the factors examined were employment professionals’ expectations regarding participants’ employment prospects.

The BIP population consisted primarily of Danish recipients of social assistance assessed as not immediately work-ready. Its findings should therefore not automatically be generalised to all participant groups.

For Iris Group, the research reinforces an important practice observation:

The professional is not simply the person who delivers the intervention. The professional is part of the intervention.

This also means that workforce capability cannot be separated from system design. If services are regulated so tightly that professional judgement has very limited scope, there is a risk that the system does not fully use the expertise it simultaneously requires professionals to possess.

One of the most challenging issues emerging from our practitioner interviews concerns the relationship between support and control.

In several services delivered by Iris Group, professionals are expected to establish trust, understand barriers and motivation, support behavioural change and work with the participant to identify a realistic pathway forward.

At the same time, some services require providers to register attendance, document deviations and report information that may subsequently affect the participant’s financial benefits.

Both functions have legitimate purposes. Publicly funded systems require accountability, compliance with rules and responsible use of public resources.

However, combining these functions within the same professional relationship creates a tension that Iris Group practitioners describe as a recurring challenge.

A relationship intended to support change often depends on the participant feeling able to disclose that something is not working: that motivation has declined, that they did not manage to attend, that their health has deteriorated, that they are afraid, that they have failed at something or that they did not understand what was expected.

If the same information may also have financial consequences, the nature of that relationship can change.

The professional may effectively hold two roles: the person expected to provide support and the person who also represents part of the monitoring and control system.

This raises an important question for future employability systems:

How can employment services build the trust and professional relationship needed for long-term change when the same relationship also includes monitoring and reporting that may affect the participant’s income?

This is not simply a question of interpersonal practice.

It is a question of system design and of the roles that professionals are given within that system.

Continuity emerged repeatedly in our interviews and operational experience.

For people with relatively straightforward support needs, changing practitioner or provider may be manageable. For people with complex needs, the consequences may be more significant.

A relationship has been established. Someone understands the person’s history. The participant may finally have begun to explain what is actually difficult. The professional has learned which situations work and which do not.

Then the person or service changes.

Iris Group’s internal quality report on Introduction to Work (INAB) identifies staff turnover as an operational challenge. Some participants changed employment consultant several times, and the report describes instances where progression appeared to lose momentum following such changes.

This is an internal operational observation, not evidence of a general causal relationship. However, similar concerns emerged from our practitioner interviews when participants moved between services and organisations.

This raises a wider system question.

When a participant moves from one intervention or organisation to another, continuity is not simply about transferring information. For people with complex support needs, relationship, understanding and accumulated trust may also be assets that are lost in the transition.

For people with complex support needs, continuity should not be regarded merely as a matter of service experience. It may be part of the quality of the intervention itself.

Preparatory interventions can be valuable.

They become more problematic when preparation is prolonged, standardised and disconnected from real workplaces.

Iris Group’s experience suggests that, for many people, development may be more effective when support and contact with working life occur in parallel, rather than through a long sequence of preparatory stages before workplace participation begins.

This is consistent with an important principle within Supported Employment and IPS.

Meta-analytic research shows that IPS can improve competitive employment outcomes compared with traditional vocational services. The strongest evidence base concerns people with serious mental illness. Evidence for other populations is developing but is smaller and more heterogeneous.

Iris Group therefore does not assume that IPS findings can simply be generalised across all participant groups.

Rather, the evidence supports a broader question:

Does a person always need to demonstrate that they are “work-ready” before entering a workplace – or can the workplace itself be one of the environments in which capability, confidence and independence develop?

This has implications for how employability pathways are sequenced. Preparatory support and workplace participation need not always be consecutive stages. In some circumstances, they may be more effective when they occur together.

Employer engagement is sometimes treated as the final stage of employment support.

First the participant is prepared. Then an employer is found.

Iris Group’s experience suggests a different approach.

Employers often need to be actively involved much earlier.

This may involve understanding disability or mental health conditions, exploring different ways of organising work, adapting hours or tasks, using assistive technology, understanding available employment support or simply developing confidence that an unfamiliar solution can work.

Iris Group’s INAB quality report includes employer feedback describing work trials that developed into employment and successful matches where employers wanted participants to remain after the work trial.

Effective employer engagement therefore requires relationships, not simply a list of companies to contact when a placement is needed.

Our interviews also highlighted an area where Iris Group itself can improve.

We need to become better at building, maintaining and sharing employer relationships over time and across different parts of our organisation.

This self-reflection matters because the employer is not merely the recipient of the final result.

The employer can be part of the intervention itself.

This also raises a question about funding and commissioning:

Do funding models adequately support the long-term, relationship-based employer engagement and individualisation that sustainable employment may require?

Employment support systems are often activated once a person has already become unemployed.

But what happens when an employee’s work capacity changes while much of their knowledge, experience and organisational competence remains valuable?

One case from Iris Group’s career transition work concerned a person with a progressive neurological condition who could no longer perform their previous practical role.

With support during the transition process, an opportunity was identified in customer service within the same company. The work could be carried out from home, and the employee’s existing knowledge of the organisation became an asset. The pathway ultimately led to subsidised employment with the existing employer.

A single case cannot establish effectiveness. But it raises an important question:

Why wait until valuable competence has left the workplace before exploring whether it can be retained?

Systematic reviews of disability management, job retention and workplace accommodation identify recurring components including early intervention, workplace accommodation, alternative or transitional duties and communication between relevant stakeholders.

These reviews do not establish that any single workplace accommodation will produce a particular outcome. They do, however, support the importance of considering the workplace itself as part of job-retention and return-to-work strategies.

Future employment and rehabilitation systems therefore need to consider not only how people can return to work after unemployment, but also how employers and employees can be supported to retain valuable competence when a person’s circumstances or work capacity change.

People with complex needs of support rarely interact with only one organisation.

They may need to navigate systems involving the Swedish Public Employment Service, municipalities, healthcare, the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, education providers, employment service providers and employers.

Each organisation may act correctly within its own remit – and the overall experience may still fail the individual.

Our interviews describe transitions where relationships, information and momentum are lost. A new professional or organisation needs to understand the situation again. Waiting periods emerge. Participants may be expected to carry information between systems themselves.

For someone already dealing with significant barriers, this can become an additional burden.

One practitioner described her role as closer to that of a case manager or project manager than simply a job coach. If someone is at risk of losing their home, cannot provide for their children or is experiencing a serious personal crisis, concentrating on writing a CV may not be realistic.

This does not mean that employment providers should solve every problem.

It means that employability systems need mechanisms through which someone can help maintain coherence, connect the relevant actors and keep the employment objective in view.

The participant should not have to project-manage all the systems around them.

Collaboration should therefore not be judged solely by the number of organisations involved or the number of coordination meetings held.

A more important question is:

Does the participant experience the support as coherent and relevant to what they need in order to move forward?

Publicly funded employment services require accountability.

Equal treatment, legal certainty, quality assurance and responsible use of public funds all require structure, documentation and control.

Iris Group’s experience also suggests, however, that administration and steering can have unintended consequences.

The INAB quality report describes increased administrative requirements during the contract period and a more time-consuming approval process for work-trial placements. In some cases, an employer contact was lost or a planned start date had to be changed.

The same report describes local dialogue with the Swedish Public Employment Service as generally good and notes that local cooperation could help resolve difficulties.

That balance is important.

Our practitioner interviews also contain more everyday examples of administrative burden. Professionals describe situations in which the same meeting or activity may need to be handled across several administrative systems. Each registration may have an understandable purpose, but collectively the requirements can take time away from work with participants and employers.

The relevant question is therefore not whether employment systems should choose between control and freedom.

It is:

How can systems ensure quality, equal treatment and accountability without allowing administration and detailed steering to consume the time, professional discretion and capacity needed to help people move forward?

The same question applies to funding and outcome models.

Iris Group’s experience is that funding arrangements in commissioned services do not always provide sufficient conditions for individualisation or for the long-term, relationship-based employer work that sustainable outcomes may require.

This is a practice observation, not a definitive conclusion.

But it raises a question that deserves further investigation:

Do funding and performance models reward the work that contributes to sustainable outcomes – or primarily the activities and outcomes that are easiest to define, record and measure?

Discussions about workforce capability often focus on recruitment, qualifications and methodology.

Our interviews point to another dimension: the conditions under which professionals themselves work.

Working closely with people in vulnerable situations can involve difficult conversations, complex needs and situations where practitioners feel significant concern for a participant.

Some interviewees described occasions when professionals can feel alone in dealing with such situations.

Professional quality therefore depends not only on who is recruited or which formal qualifications are required.

It also depends on what happens afterwards.

Is there access to peer support? Professional supervision? Specialist expertise? Managers who understand the complexity of the work? Time for reflection and learning?

If professionals are expected to exercise judgement, organisations and commissioning systems also need to create conditions in which that judgement can develop and be used responsibly.

A high-quality employment service does not only require skilled professionals. It also requires systems and organisations that enable them to act professionally.

This is relevant not only to workforce wellbeing, but to service quality.

When someone enters employment, the intervention is often considered complete.

For a person with continuing support needs, however, this may be precisely when a new challenge begins.

Do the working hours function in practice? Are the tasks appropriate? Do assistive tools work in the actual workplace? Does the employer know what adjustments can be made if difficulties emerge?

A central principle of Supported Employment and IPS is that support can continue after employment begins.

Interestingly, Iris Group’s experience of IPSU points in a similar direction.

Iris Hadar’s internal report proposes a development in which support could, where needed, follow the participant from education through workplace-based learning and into employment. It also proposes a possible IPSU C – workplace adaptation component, including assistive technology, pedagogical and technical support for the individual and support for supervisors and workplaces.

This is a proposed service development, not an evaluated outcome.

But it raises an important system-design question:

Should employment always mark the end of support – or should it sometimes be understood as the beginning of a new phase in which the objective is to make employment sustainable?

Before, during and after unemployment

When Iris Group’s experience across these different services is considered together, a broader picture emerges.

Employment support may need to be understood less as a sequence of separate interventions and more as a coherent pathway through working life.

BEFORE – prevent unnecessary labour-market exit

When a person’s work capacity or circumstances change, employers and employees need opportunities to explore whether valuable competence can be retained through workplace adaptation, changed duties, professional support and available employment support measures where relevant.

DURING – organise the person’s pathway, not only the interventions

Support needs to be capable of individualisation. Continuity and coherent responsibility matter. Professionals need capability and appropriate discretion. Employers and real workplaces need to be involved earlier.

At the same time, service design needs to recognise how monitoring responsibilities, administration, funding models and organisational boundaries affect the relationship between the professional and the participant.

Outcome frameworks also need to capture progression and transition – not only final outcomes.

AFTER – make the outcome sustainable

For some people, entering employment is sufficient.

For others, support may need to remain available for a period for both the employee and the employer.

The objective is not simply employment. The objective is sustainable working life.

The evidence and experience presented here do not lead to a single model for future employment services.

They do, however, raise a set of questions that Iris Group believes should be considered in the design of future employability ecosystems:

• How can continuity be maintained across organisational boundaries?
• How can professionals be given sufficient discretion while maintaining quality, accountability and equal treatment?
• How can necessary monitoring and control be designed without undermining the trust on which effective support may depend?
• How can employers become involved earlier and more meaningfully?
• How can progression and sustainability be measured alongside employment outcomes?
• How can services support employers to retain valuable competence before unemployment occurs?
• And how can support remain available, where needed, after a person enters employment?

After more than three decades of working with people who need different forms of support to enter, return to or remain in working life, Iris Group’s central conclusion is:

Future employability ecosystems should be organised around the person’s pathway to sustainable working life – before, during and, where needed, after unemployment – rather than around the boundaries between organisations, programmes and contracts.

This submission deliberately combines different forms of evidence: professional experience, fact-checked practitioner interviews, internal operational data, documented participant and employer feedback, anonymised practice cases and external research.

The operational evidence presented here includes selected data and learning from Introduction to Work (INAB) and IPSU – Individualised Learning Support during Education and Training.

Iris Group is also preparing a similar report on experiences, outcomes and learning from Steg till arbete, expected in December 2026/January 2027.

Additional operational and outcome data may also be available within other Iris Group services and in external systems. These data could potentially be used to examine whether the patterns identified in this submission recur across different services and participant groups.

We have deliberately not undertaken extensive new data analysis solely for this Call for Evidence. Instead, we have sought to identify the patterns that appear most significant from our existing evidence and operational experience.

If Project DEEP Sweden chooses to explore these questions further, Iris Group would welcome the opportunity to contribute additional data, deeper analysis, further participant and employer perspectives and additional practice cases.

Potential areas for further exploration include:

• progression, transition and sustainability across different participant groups;
• the relationship between professional discretion, continuity and outcomes;
• the interaction between supportive relationships and monitoring responsibilities;
• employer engagement and workplace-based support;
• support following entry into employment;
• funding, administrative requirements and professional practice;
• approaches that prevent unnecessary labour-market exit and help employers retain competence.

Our contribution is therefore not intended as the final word. It is an invitation to examine these questions more closely, using both research and the accumulated evidence of practice.

Läs Irisgruppens bidrag med erfarenheter till Project DEEP Sweden – Från insats till hållbart arbetsliv »