October 21, 2008, St. Petersburg
A group of European students from Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences visited Arcadia, Inc., during their study tour to St. Petersburg. As usual, Arcadia became part of the learning process for the future managers and businessmen, helping them to get a general picture of Russian business.
Arcadia, Inc. has been co-operating with the Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences (until August, 2008 called EVTEK) for 5 years. Twice a year a group of students comes to St. Petersburg to have a close look at Russian life, culture and business. They visit a number of Russian companies (Arcadia, Novaya Era, Baltika brewery, Russian office of Ruukki, Finno-Russian innovation centre), see cultural places of interest and realities of a megapolis with population which is comparable to the population of the whole Finland (4.5 mln and 5.3 mln respectively). This time the group consisted of students from Finland, Germany and Switzerland.
Arcadia’s Director for business development, Svetlana Kazanskaya, made a presentation for the students, telling them about company activities and about custom software development business. After that, the students asked their questions: about the company, about IT-industry, about business in Russia. By the way, after asking us about salary levels (which becomes more and more close to European IT salaries), taxation (which is far lower yet) and career opportunities (which are quite good), some students got curious: where does Arcadia search for new employees? does it employ foreign specialists? is it obligatory to know Russian?...
Of course, we also asked them about their impressions. “So, how do you like it here?” we asked. They answered: “So many people…” Olli Hämäläinen, the guide of the group, told us that some of the problems of the Finnish university are quite familiar to us: it is difficult for the students in a University to gain a concept of business processes in commercial companies. For example, while working on “toy” software development projects in the University, students cannot understand, why do they need all the documents and formal procedures – such projects are too small and this documentation seems to be superfluous. Meeting with representatives of real business allows the students to get notion of real work in companies of different profiles. They also find out that people in St. Petersburg have similar culture and that it is not frightful to co-operate with Russian business.
Additional info:
Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences was formed in August 2008 as a result of merger of EVTEK University of Applied Sciences and Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia. The Metropolia has four fields of study: technology, health care and social services, economics and business administration, and culture, all of which will provide teaching also in English. The students will number some 14,000 and the staff about 1,100. As a learning environment, Metropolia fosters the know-how, creativity and well-being of its members. As a university of applied sciences, it focuses specifically on the positive development of the labour market, culture and social aspects of the Helsinki metropolitan area by providing training of high international standard and by producing practical innovations.