Helsinki Company visits - Nokia & Aditro

Last year for my course Tools For Organisational Change we went to Helsinki for the day to visit two companies Aditro which is a consulting company and the headquarters of Nokia.

Only until recently I even found out that The company Nokia was from Finland!This was the first visit of the day and as you can see from my pictures the building was amazing ! It was built with practically all glass as the outer face and the inside was just as impressing with spiral staircases, wooden floors,a view of the sea and various floors of offices built with glass! we all got our own name badges as we entered and we were led to a conference room where are host led us a talk about driving change within their company. The whole point of the talk was linked to our studies in this course and it was how the company drives changes with their projects. They provided us with tea and coffee and the BEST Finnish pastries, they certainly taste nicer than English ones anyway!

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The amazing architecture inside the Nokia building

The topic in our lecture at Nokia

After this we had a short time to get lunch from a local shopping centre in Helsinki. I really would have liked a longer time to spend in Helsinki but it was a tight turn around because we had to go from company to company.  But i shall definitely be spending a day or two in Helsinki to properly look around the city!

We then went to our last stop for the day which was the Aditro consultancy company, not as impressive by any means but it was still nice to see another Finnish company and how it works. This talk was taken by two male employees and this was about Lean management which also complimented my studies in Operations Management. We were put into groups and we had to watch a video of their boss making a cup of coffee, we had to list all of the processes into a value stream map and then we had to see which ones were waste and could be eliminated to make it a quicker process. It was nice to do something interactive in the day and dare I say It I think I learnt more about lean management in 1 hour than I have in 8 weeks of classes of operations management!

So that was the end of our trip which I thoroughly enjoyed! It was nice to see some Finnish companies and makes me want to aspire to maybe do something like that when I finish my degree ! I just wish I was fluent in Finnish :( 

Moi Moi Nicole xo

Stockholm or booze cruise?

I went to Stockholm on a trip back in September but I thought I would share and look back on the time there.The first organised exchange trip for last year was a boat trip to Stockholm,3 days in total. But we would technically Spend more time on the boat than in the city!

There were about 100 students on this trip and we took the coach from Tampere to the dock in Helsinki. As expected, on the boat we would all be staying in the economy cabins which are in the bowels of the ship beneath the cars even! Our cabins were for 4 people and we were mixed with people we had never met before on exchange but my cabin were all really nice luckily!

The small cabin for 4

The duty free shop on the boat at 5pm and all the students were queued up waiting to get their alcohol for the journey. As soon as some of them had purchased their drink people who hadn't already started drinking on the coach to Helsinki started at 5pm!!! It was so crazy,I certainly didn't  In the evening there was various entertainment on the ship including and ABBA tribute in the nightclub,bingo and a guitarist in the Irish bar. But I think everyone had the idea of just drinking in the corridors of the ship and annoying other people on the boat. I felt so sea sick so I retired to my cabin to 'try' and sleep....so that didn't happen,everyone was so rowdy. I just thought it was ridiculous that the majority of the other exchange students are ages 25 plus and they were all behaving like under aged teenagers,I like to think I'm more classy than drinking on the floor of the ships corridors anyway. I think most peoples morals for the trip were 'its all about the journey, not the destination' But This part of the trip I did not enjoy...

Corridor drinking,so much fun....

Anyway, we arrived at Stockholm the following day at 10am and we had to be back to the ship by 4pm meaning that we only had 6 hours in the city. However, by the time we got the bus into town this only left us with 5 hours which is not enough time to do anything! No one really had a plan as to what to do so we headed straight into the centre where all the shops were. The city really reminds me of a French city, it really was so beautiful. The shops were very upmarket and I was surprised to see shops such as American Apparel and Urban Outfitters! After walking through the shops we found a local market selling fruits and vegetables which was a refreshing change from the shops.

Gorgeous fruit market

Beautiful Cathedral

In the afternoon we headed into the old town and had a look around a cathedral which had gorgeous design work  inside. The weather was so gorgeous on the day so we spent some time sat in the sun also by a water feature in the old town. Sadly this is all we managed to do in our few hours time that we had in Stockholm! The trip only cost 55 euros so I got what I expected, but I shall definitely be visiting this beautiful city again but perhaps by air this time! The next exchange trip that i went on was  St Petersburg which was for 5 days and i will be getting a post up on that soon! Thanks for reading :)

Sat by the water feature in the sun :)

Moi Moi Nicole xo