Changes in the welfare state are creating new patterns of regulation that are creating mismatches between social, education, and labor policies. These developments are changing the social order and citizenship within national contexts in ways that challenge the ethos of nationally anchored human service work. Building on the case of practical nurse reform in Finland, this paper interrogates the driving forces that are reshaping national humans service work ethos and agency. For example, vocational education in human service work was oriented to building up social infrastructure but is now reoriented to avoiding unemployment and supporting rehabilitation and migration. It endorses an individualistic ethos, positioning practitioners and clients as individuals who are always in the process of becoming. Policy safeguards this fluent flow through education and seamless service production in the care sector as the parameters of the new rationality of cost-efficiency. My argument is that the eroding of the Nordic welfare state ethos promoting human service work is congruently enabling and disempowering the service workers and their clients. Documenting these processes allows interrogation of the gendering of neo-liberal transformation, the impact on legacies of women-dominated human service occupations and emerging inequalities in human service workforce?