Finland – IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support – Digital system (SaaS) for the national certificates of language proficiency (NCLP) in Finland

The main object of the procurement is a digital system that enables the creation, maintenance, assessment, and production of results for the Finnish national certificates of language proficiency (NCLP) examination. This procurement only concerns the Finnish and Swedish language examinations, which account for approximately 95% of all the NCLP examinees (currently ca. 10,000 per year across all NCLP languages). The reason for the purchase of a digital system for the NCLP examination is that the National Agency is preparing for an increase in the number of examinees for the Finnish and Swedish language tests due to the current Government's programme that has several goals related to immigrants’ command of the two national languages. One of these is the requirement to demonstrate proficiency in Finnish or Swedish as a condition for granting a permanent residence permit. In addition, a possible future language allowance for labor market support is also expected to increase the number of examinees for Finnish and Swedish. Thus, the current number of examinees (close to 10,000 per year for Finnish and Swedish) is estimated to rise significantly. The new system must be able to exchange information / data with the existing digital system (the NCLP tool) owned by the University of Jyväskylä / CALS. The NCLP tool was developed to (semi)automatically exchange information with the national Opintopolku (Studyinfo) system owned by the National Agency; Opintopolku is used for registration purposes by the examinees and test centres, and for the examinees to retrieve their digital certificates after the exam results are ready.