A summer at Finnfund: Learning about communication cultures, measuring impact and creative thinking

‘Relaxed’ and ‘ambitious’ are the first words that the four summer trainees Oskar Kojonen, Eetu Turunen, Maria Garcia and Iris Raunu (unfortunately missing from the picture) choose when asked to describe the Finnfund work community. Some of them have been with us since April, one just started a couple of weeks ago. How is it going, how has it been?

Diving into diverse investments

Oskar Kojonen joined Finnfund’s investment team at the end of May and is currently working on a project that includes going through financial statements of companies in our investment portfolio. “This really gives me a good overview of Finnfund’s EUR 830 million portfolio, and I find it very interesting how diverse the investment cases are,” he says. Finnfund currently has investments in 53 countries, which means that Oskar has been delving into several markets with which he was not previously familiar.

53 countries, 53 communication cultures?

Eetu Turunen has previous experience from a traineeship at Finnfund: he worked in Finnfund’s finance team already last summer and has been with us part-time alongside his studies during the winter period as well. During the summer months, he is working full-time in the same team. “Of course I wanted to come back!” he says. “Last year, I was more involved in accounting and now I’m working in back office.” The diversity of Finnfund’s investment portfolio is one of the key characteristics in Eetu’s work as well: “With all the different countries, you quickly see how different the communication cultures are,” he says. His colleagues have been sharing their wisdom and experiences of what to consider when contacting people from different parts of the world.

Measuring impact: Creative and technical

Something that all four trainees highlight is the importance of taking initiative and the ability to solve problems. Marina Garcia was the first trainee to start for the season as she joined our development impact team already in April. “I have always been interested in development but never seen a financing company’s perspective before” she says. She works with impact monitoring and is in close contact with Finnfund’s investee companies. “It is truly motivating since my work will contribute to measuring how effective Finnfund’s work is,” she says. “Measuring impact is not an easy task, but I am really impressed by the team: they are extremely ambitious and continuously developing their processes.” According to Marina, working with development impact requires a creative but at the same time technical approach, since there is a lot of data to be collected while the context needs to be taken into account.

Welcoming and helpful colleagues

Finnfund is also the administrator of the Finnpartnership Business Partnership programme, which is funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Finnpartnership offers advisory services and business partnership support to Finnish companies. Iris Raunu started as a trainee at Finnpartnership just two weeks ago but has already contributed a lot to the team thanks to her language skills for example. She was attracted by the dynamic team at Finnpartnership and the opportunity to get a good overview of their work during the trainee period. “The relaxed yet professional feeling that I got during the interviews seems to match the reality as well,” she says.

All four trainees praise both their colleagues who have been welcoming and helpful as well as the general atmosphere at Finnfund. Would they recommend a traineeship? “Absolutely!” all four say. “But you should enjoy problem-solving and adapting the information you have to the task at hand” says Oskar. The others agree and add that one should be able to take initiative, be curious and keep looking for ways to tackle everyday challenges, like documents written in a language you don’t speak. “That is when an online translating tool is your best friend!” they all laugh, apparently having been in these situations every now and then.