My traineeship story in Marketing team

Writer: Minju Kang

From the May of 2021, I have been working in the marketing team of University of Eastern Finland as a trainee. Since I worked at an admissions office in an international school before coming to Finland and worked closely with the marketing team there, I was interested in recruitment of students and promotion events for students. The jobs I have been doing in the marketing team are quite in line with the ones I did before, but the targeting age groups are different, and the scale of marketing is much bigger and wider here. The marketing team is under the Communications and relations department and, apart from my team, we have several different teams under the department such as design & video producing team, international affair team or translation team.

Unfortunately, due to the pandemic of COVID-19, the most staffs have been working at home. I and my manager, Anna are also working at the campus only two days a week. For this reason, I have not seen the most staffs in the department in person yet, but we have online meeting once a week to share what issues are going on in each team. Also, morning coffee time is arranged online every week. Thankfully, whenever I join the meeting, all staffs speak in English.

The marketing team work very closely with the Student learning department. During the traineeship period, I have worked with Kazeem, who is a trainee in the Student and Learning Services department. For example, I cooperatively work with him for preparation of resources for creation of webpages, writing newsletters for prospective students, and suggestion for marketing ideas on active use of networks. While coming up some marketing ideas for international students, my personal experience that I searched for where to study two years ago was helpful.

I have found that Finnish working environment takes care of individual staffs quite well. There is an exercise program that you can join every day regularly to prevent yourself from sitting too long time. Besides, there are a lot of opportunities to develop professional skills as a staff. UEF provides the staffs with diverse training such as programme for learning office tools or enhancing time management skills. You can participate in these training programmes during the working time.

Even though it is a short-term traineeship, I have had an enriching and fruitful work experience with nice, kind, and professional staffs at UEF. This experience has taught me how online marketing works in a higher educational institute, how marketing resources are created and what international working environment in Finland is like.