2009, what’s going on
Hei.
After another long period of time, I’m back here again to sum up briefly the past one year or so.
So after i’d finnished the last courses at HSE (the last one got the best grade, 97% in the “Demographic Analysis in the Intl. Business” course… me and my team focused on the labor availability in Romania, Bulgaria and Poland, profession by profession, we projected everything for the next couple of years and we finally compared it to Finland :D ) i went to make a research financed by the Outokumpu Company. Expectably, the research was about skilled labor in the Eastern Europe, namely Latvia, Poland and Bulgaria. Visited those countries, spent weeks in buses, planes, trains, metros, etc. And with a quite a successful result, got a good appraisal :)
Then i went to Denmark, i spent there half a year at Aarhus School of Business. Took four subjects (B2B Marketing, Persuasion, Aspects of Denmark and Cultural Studies). As much as i could, i focused on… surprise surprise… labor mobility throughout Europe. Especially in the “Cultural Studies“, i researched about the Central&Eastern European labor migration to UK. And in the “Aspects of Denmark” course, i focused on the labor market features in Denmark, and compared it with Finland. Not surprisingly, i kept in mind the comparison between DK and FI from the point of view of the international labor attraction :) What else, right?…Well, apart of spending the whole time in Denmark, i also went to Poland and Bulgaria again, during autumn. To train my language skills in both of those countries… i was impressed by myself when i spent 20 minutes chatting in Bulgarian with a Bulgarian taxi driver :) For instance. Am i crazy? Yesss. A language freak :P
And then i went back to Finland, after an incredible New Year’s Eve in Berlin, and participated on the Venture Cup, a Finnish competition of innovative business ideas. After gathering together my team, we were working on… well, is it a secret that it was in the field of international labor mobility? So we were creating a business plan for that. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite manage to sort out all the technical issues, given we had only 5 weeks instead of 5 months, like the other teams. So we kinda didnt win ;) So our winning a prize (10 or 15 or 25.000 euros) is postponed for the next year’s round. We will be much better prepared :)
And finally I’ve started working on creating my first non-for-profit organization, called NordicFields. It will promote training and networking for future recruiters and other HR people specialized in the european mobility of professionals. (www.nordicfields.org) Well, now it’s progressing quite painfully, coz everyone is deliberately uninterested in the issues of labor availability, in the times of a worldwide unemployment increase… especially in Finland. Veeery shortsighted but reality. So at least i have time to prepare myself thoroughly, and be ready when the right time comes, in two years :)
Greetings from Helsinki,
Tomas.
