BACKGROUND:Policymakers have a growing interest in the role played by employers in promoting labour market participation for jobseekers with support needs. This is reflected in the development of demand-led approaches which adopt employers' hiring requirements as a starting point for labour market intervention. OBJECTIVE:The article examines the work of job agents, who promote the matching of jobseekers and employers in a Norwegian demand-led approach called Ripples in the Water (RiW). The aim is to understand job agents' strategic and brokering work of employer engagement. METHODS:Explorative, qualitative study based on interviews and field notes from formal and informal meetings with job agents, employers and jobseekers in RiW. RESULTS:Job agents function as knowledge brokers who connect the discourses of welfare and market. CONCLUSIONS:RiW represents one possible approach to increasing employer engagement in vocational rehabilitation. Job agents in RiW build relations with employers by reframing vocational rehabilitation.

Mild-to-moderate iodine deficiency remains a problem worldwide, including in Norway. Of particular, concern is fertile, pregnant and lactating women. The Norwegian Dairy Council developed a digital iodine-specific dietary screener (I-screener) for the assessment of iodine intake levels but has yet to be validated. The aim was thus to investigate the relative validity of the I-screener by comparing estimates of iodine intake from the I-screener against a single 24-hour recall (24HR) and urinary iodine concentration (UIC) in fertile women. Healthy females were recruited in Bergen in August–December 2021. Six spot-urine samples from six consecutive days were collected into a pooled sample to assess UIC. Each participant completed a single administration of the I-screener and the 24HR. The estimated daily iodine intake from the I-screener was compared with the estimations from the 24HR and UIC. Seventy-two women aged 19–39 completed the study. The median UIC was 76 μg/l. Compared with the 24HR, the I-screener placed 83 % of the participants in the same/adjacent tertial, with a slight agreement between the methods (Cohen's kappa = 0⋅187). The present study shows an acceptable correlation between the I-screener and the 24HR (r = 0⋅318), but not between the I-screener and UIC (r = 0⋅122). Despite its varying iodine estimate abilities, the I-screener may be used as an initial screening tool to rank fertile women on an individual level into deficient inadequate, and sufficient iodine intake. However, due to the relatively high risk of misclassification, further assessment of iodine status should follow.

In Norway, vocational rehabilitation for people with support needs involves complex inter-professional and inter-organizational processes that do not have clear institutional boundaries. Every process involves a new constellation of actors, representing divergent practices, ideas and objectives. This article argues that much of the current research on the implementation of activation policy inadequately captures the mechanisms and processes that influence vocational rehabilitation practices. The article proposes the use of institutional ethnography (IE) to empirically examine vocational rehabilitation, and argues that IE provides methodological concepts and tools that enable researchers to link and make visible the everyday practices, the social relations and the institutional contexts that make up vocational rehabilitation processes.

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