Finding my place in Talent Attraction Management

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With a New Year beginning, I thought it would be appropriate to look back at my internship in Talent Tampere / Business Tampere and to reference these past months a bit.

I started working for Business Tampere as a project assistant in September. Time has surely flown as it only feels like a few weeks. On the other hand it feels if I had been working here for a longer time, as the team of both Business Tampere and Visit Tampere have become dear to me.

I have had the possibility to network and cooperate with a fantastic bunch of people – not just from Business Tampere, but also from ministries, organizations, companies and networks across Finland and beyond. I have been given a lot of responsibility, trust and motivation from my colleagues, which in return has given me a lot of self-esteem and pride. I have been granted permission to release my full working potential, and for this I will be forever grateful.

In Business Tampere, and Talent Tampere as well, the trainee is expected to be able to work with rather little supervision. Tampere region is growing rapidly, and everyone in Business Tampere has got their hands full. The trainee has to pick things up quickly. From an early point in September it came clear to me, that even though my team and all of my colleagues would stand behind me and support me, I was expected to take responsibility.

Being surrounded by globally minded people with an enthusiastic attitude towards entrepreneurship is really refreshing. The general atmosphere of the office is laid back and positive, but still “business casual”. By discussing and cooperating with my colleagues and the greater Talent Tampere network I have learned very much about business, startups, entrepreneurship and project management - things that I haven’t really studied at the UTA. So in that sense my internship has indeed been very fruitful.

The success of talent attraction work is not that measurable on any conventional scales or figures. The challenge in my work is, that no matter how fantastic the national wide proposals and plans regarding talent attraction are, the dominant business language is, and indeed should be Finnish. This inherent prioritizing (or jealousy?) of our tiny language challenges the goal of talent attraction work: the internationalization of our economic life. But the discussion about the languages is a whole another debate. I strongly feel that the mood towards talent attraction and hiring international talents is changing, and with it the country of Finland as well.

As my internship ended, I was hired back to work for Talent Tampere for next year and for the project Boosting Business with International Talents. This means more responsibility and more challenges, but I'm most definitely ready for them. I look forward to working for Talent Tampere in 2018