Throughout the last 2 decades, workplaces have been provided with digital services for optimizing work activities and processes. A variety of professions have incorporated their tasks for teaching and learning through the utilization of novel digital services. Teachers and students have the opportunity to interact with each other regardless of geographical locations through distance education and learning. Overall, the phenomenon of digitalization has generated consequences and effects for the society in general, and workplaces and professionals in particular.

    Recently, a notion of digitalization has reached projects conducted on a national level for integrating newcomers in Sweden. The Swedish government has appointed members from University West, together with a municipality in West Sweden to launch a novel digitalization project. The project emphasizes challenges and issues with designing, developing and evaluating an open digital experience in Civic Orientation. This paper examines and discusses a duality of digitalization by investigating how we can understand the tension between professional’s pre-understanding and affordances of digital services in Civic Orientation. We will present results from interviews with professionals at the municipality, together with results from a survey evaluation. We argue in the paper, that it is beneficial for further research, to understand the tension between professional’s beliefs and affordances of digital services.