Request for information: Language Assessment Tool

The employment services of the City of Espoo have approximately 30 000 customers. Almost half of the customers do not have Finnish as their mother tongue and this percentage is constantly increasing. The level of Finnish language skills is critical information for employment services. At the moment, the assessments are made either through Testing point tests, Integration courses tests or by the employment advisors during online or face-to-face meetings. Employment advisors lack training in language skills assessment. To be able to meet the increasing need of and to unify the level of the language skill assessments, the City of Espoo is planning a procurement of a digital platform or tool that can be used for automatic or semi-automatic assessment of language skills or proficiency. This tool does not need to provide an official testing result, but to be reliable enough to be used in education and employment counselling. While Espoo Employment Services strive to test the language skills of new clients with the support of language assessment professionals, the tool will be primarily used to yearly test the language skills of all our non-native speaking clients, whose proficiency is under C1-level. We estimate that we would have around 12 000 clients that fit into this category. The second use case is to test the language skill level of jobseekers in recruiting events in order to provide this service to potential employers. Use of the tool would not be limited to these two needs in the employment services. Also, the tool could optionally be used even in other operations within the City of Espoo, such as HR and education. The tool should be able to measure writing, reading, listening, and speaking skills. We are primarily looking for solutions that already cover Finnish which is the primary language to be assessed. However, we are also interested in tools that not yet have ability to measure Finnish skills but can be expanded to cover new languages. The purpose of this RFI is to investigate the current market of digital language assessment tools or platforms and to estimate how well they suit our needs. Please see the attached Excel sheet for further requirements and other information we are interested in. Participation in the market dialogue In order to participate, please send the filled Excel sheet and eventual attachments to Lauriina Karhu by e-mail (lauriina.karhu@espoo.fi). Send your reply at the latest on 20th of February 2025 (0:00 UTC 2+). The City of Espoo contacts might contact the parties that it wants to negotiate with. The eventual meetings will be held on weeks 10-12.