Teaching young professionals to “Speak Business”

Submitted by KA4049 on
Speak Business project

Course Strategic planning and project management in Finnish-Russian cooperation context (4 ects) was organized by University of Eastern Finland in September. The course was organized in the framework of the project Speak Business.

In advance, all the participants of the course had planned their own cooperation project ideas, and this course offered information and tools for developing project ideas from the business point of view. To ease the future cooperation, some of the time was dedicated also to language practice of Finnish and Russian languages.

The course was originally planned to be organized “live” in Joensuu, but during spring the training was transferred to webinar format. Even though the course was delayed almost six months due to corona pandemic, it managed to gather together a total of 14 young professionals – 6 of them from Finland and 8 from Russia. Meeting throughelectronical connection is always a challenge, but the specialists and teachers from University of Eastern Finland did a great job in planning interactive methods for activating participants. During the contact days a great proportion of work was done in small groups of 3-4 persons. The groups were divided according to cooperation interestsGroups’participants had time to get to know each other and consider possibility and potential to cooperate in their planned projects. The participants were active and talkative, and, in fact, in the small groups the discussions ran even more smoothly than the organizers dared to anticipate in advance. 

After the contact days participants continued to strengthen their contacts by organizing independently three smallgroup meetings. The idea was to continue cooperation and have discussions on given themes, such as projects’ cross-border cooperation perspectives and sales process. The work will continue even further within couple months on continuing course organized by Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). We are looking forward to see what kind of new project ideas the participants develop!

 

Text: Sonja Kortelainen

Photo: Ekatrina Lesnykh

 

Picture: 

participants in Zoom