There is currently no higher education institution specialising in railway technology in Finland, from which ready-made rail experts will graduate. Therefore, one good way to acquire the skills needed is to utilise recruiting training programmes. Over the years, we have found that the best professionals for the industry come from polishing the diamonds ourselves, in cooperation with a competent training partner.
Mipro’s recruitment cooperation with Saranen Consulting Oy began years ago and has recently become even closer. Several successful training entities have already been organised with them. Also, Mipro has developed its’ own educational offering by establishing an in-house training function, Mipro Akatemia (Mipro Academy), or more familiarly, MyAcademy. As one of its services, MyAcademy provides – together with an external educational service provider – tailored educational programme services to both of Mipro’s business fields.
The objective of the training programme has been ambitious; to find several new capable and enthusiastic individuals for Mipro’s expert positions. The programme is labour market training organised in cooperation with the ELY Centre (Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment), TE Services (labour market services), Mipro and education organiser Saranen. The recruiting training programme includes a 6-month internship period carried out at Mipro. In this blog, we share news and feelings along the way through the eyes of both a mentor who participated in the programme and a mentee.
Working as a mentor, Anssi Kuoppa has been involved in various cooperation projects with Saranen. The recruiting training programme differs from previous cooperation in the sense that the theoretical part of the training programme is fully tailored to Mipro’s needs. The purpose of the theory sections is to increase the mentees’ understanding of the basics of Mipro’s expert work, such as logic programming, user interface design and testing. The theory sections are intertwined together with the internship in mentees’ schedule. According to Anssi, this was a bit challenging, as with the theoretical sections breaking the week it had to be very carefully considered which projects the mentees could be involved in.
Mentors, such as Anssi, are guiding the mentees in addition to his own work. Working with the mentees has been rewarding and a learning diary has been used to monitor on-the-job learning, which keeps in mind which things need to be studied and how it is progressing. Anssi considers internships an excellent opportunity to ensure a win-win situation for both the mentee and Mipro. In addition, the diversity of the expert roles of the training programme also allows the mentees to explore a task that suits them.
Janne Metso, who started training at the beginning of the year, has been satisfied with the training programme as a whole and is eagerly looking forward to continuing.
The training programme has been clearly implemented and attention has been paid to the implementation. The aim of the programme is to train new employees for Mipro’s rail business unit. The trainings organised during the programme have been interesting in terms of content and, best of all, most of the learning takes place in the workplace, by working. The training started with an intensive three-week orientation at Mipro’s Mikkeli office, and it was clear from the very beginning that Mipro also wants to commit very strongly to the training programme. After all, the aim is that those selected for the training will be employed by Mipro in the future.
I applied to the training programme organised by Mipro and Saranen as I wanted to change professions. I have worked in the IT industry for a long time, and I’ve been maturing the thought in my mind of finding something new for quite some time. I think I originally found an advert for the training organised by Saranen and Mipro via Instagram and it immediately seemed interesting. In particular, my attention was drawn to the work of a HW and SW testing engineer. My goal is to gain employment in a new sector providing plenty of challenges and interesting work. Of course, it doesn’t matter if you do “old tasks” from time to time, but alongside this new job if necessary. Time will tell how it turns out then. I look forward to challenges and interesting things to do in the future. It has been surprising to see how many different elements and fragments there are, all related to each other, on what looks like a simple stretch of railway, where trains sometimes go south and sometimes north.
Residing in the town of Oulu in Northern Finland, I have now become familiar with both Mikkeli and Oulu offices, and both have a positive working atmosphere. The employees are clearly valued at Mipro, and I am pleased to see that; this partly encourages me to want to be part of the Mipro family. I also very much appreciate the flexible possibility of remote work which these days is already quite common, and the hybrid model is already in use in many companies around the world. If necessary and agreed, I can work both at home and in the office.
My expectations were high when the training started. So far, I have not been disappointed, on the contrary. My expectations are high for the future too, and I strongly believe that I will continue to enjoy working at Mipro.
The training programme has now been going on for about four months, which means we are over halfway there. Everyone who started the internship has already got a good grip on their tasks and the future at Mipro looks promising. We are very pleased that the recruitment cooperation produced excellent results already during the application phase and that we got so many potential future rail experts into the programme. In Janne’s words, expectations are still high for the future too, and we believe that as a result of the training, many new rail transport experts will be employed by us.
AUTHOR
Saila Liukkonen
HR Business Partner
Mipro Oy
Saila has done a long career as a supervisor in her home region of Etelä-Savo, South East Finland. At Mipro Saila started in 2018 and moved to an HR position in 2021. Saila is responsible for recruitment at Mipro, as well as for competence development as the Principal of MyAcademy, a Mipro internal education academy.
