Det här inlägget hör till serien där alumner berättar om sina studier i marknadsföring på Hanken och om sina nuvarande jobb. Jag har bett dem berätta varför de valt att studera marknadsföring, vad de tagit med sig till arbetslivet och hurudana arbetsuppgifter de har idag. Nu som då kommer dylika gästinlägg att publiceras här på bloggen. Tanken med dessa typer av gästinlägg är att försöka ge en bild av vad man kan jobba med när man studerat marknadsföring. Eftersom ämnet är rätt så brett kan det vara intressant att få konkreta exempel på vad man kan jobba med efter studierna.

Hi,

My name is Sarah Väre and I am 26 year-old alumna from Hanken, now working as an Area Marketing Specialist for Europe and Africa at Wärtsilä Power Plants. I started the Strategic Marketing Management master’s program at Hanken back in 2011, after my journey had taken me there from a year of theater studies, a Bachelor’s degree in Art History at Åbo Akademi University, an exchange student semester in the US, and finally half a year as a trainee in Norway. Having studied marketing in the States and worked with culture in Norway, I realized I saw my future in the business sector, where I could use creativity to make financial results. Wanting to move back to Finland and study in my native language Swedish, Hanken was the natural choice for me with its international image and well-renowned education. I was right to do so, as Hanken has been an important factor in who I professionally am today.

In 2011-2012, I did a year of full-time master’s studies at Hanken, learning plenty about teamwork and strategic business thinking. In the summer, after that first year, I got the job as a trainee in communications at Wärtsilä. The following academic year I worked part-time at Wärtsilä while writing my thesis. In my thesis I was granted the chance to combine visual analysis, which I had also previously studied in my Bachelor’s thesis, with storytelling, a topic that had struck a cord with me in my marketing studies at Hanken. That second year at Hanken was a great time – I was half student with an interesting subject to study during the days and with all the fun that the weekends entailed, and half a professional, learning the ropes of a multinational corporate. In the spring I became part of the marketing team in the Power Plants division of Wärtsilä, working as a trainee. Half a year later, the following fall 2013, I got hired at Wärtsilä with the full-time contract I have today. In a way I was lucky to be hired as green as I was – I am grateful that my boss took the risk of taking on someone who had not even graduated yet – but at the same time it meant that my thesis writing was prolonged by a year.

As an Area Marketing Specialist at Wärtsilä Power Plants, I am responsible for the marketing activities in the European and African regions. This means setting up and following regional marketing budgets, proposing marketing activities to local sales and supporting them in their execution. In practice, I do constant project management, mostly for different events in my regions. It starts from negotiating sponsorship prices or participation fees (this small part I really enjoy), to visioning the general marketing message of Wärtsilä in a huge exhibition, to finally thinking about the nitty-gritty details of what hors d’oeuvres to serve during a cocktail hour. When I am not working with events I do a lot of proofreading of different marketing (content) texts that we produce. Writing and proofreading these texts has given me the opportunity to learn a great deal about a field and sector that I would have never imagined myself having any kind of working knowledge in when first graduating as an Art History major, or even when starting at Hanken.

At the moment my team and I are thinking about how to best utilize digital marketing in our B2B environment and how to engage the rest of the employees in our company to become advocates of our cause. Although online marketing was never a topic per se in my studies, I feel that my time at Hanken has helped me in tackling possible issues that may arise in any sort of marketing communication. Hanken taught me a strategic way of thinking about marketing activities, seeing them as a whole. Hanken also gave me a good start to the international career I always wanted, with the university’s international atmosphere (much thanks to the large proportion of exchange students there), its language classes and many master’s courses in English. Today I work verbally and in writing in English (which is why I felt this blog post needed to be in English), and that has never been a problem as working in a foreign language was natural already during my studies.

If I had done anything different at my time at Hanken, it would have been taking more classes outside my comfort zone and my strict area of study. Learning more finance or accounting is something that I have had to, and still have to do, on my own, without lecturers to guide me. It would have been easy to take a class at Hanken, but I was too busy working and finishing my degree. One thing I did do at Hanken, however, was to choose a topic for my thesis that I really enjoyed. To a marketing student at Hanken (or actually to anyone) I would give this piece of advice: find what it is that interests you and make it your day job, because you will spend a great proportion of your life at work.