Nearly 60 employers were offering summer job vacancies to students at the Aalto Summer Job Day event

Aalto University’s Career Services organise several career and recruitment events annually. The largest of these events have been the Aalto Summer Job Day, ICT industry TalentIT Fair and the School of Business’s ARENA Career Fair in November, as well as the CHEM Career Forum in December, which is targeted at students in chemical engineering. In the future, the ARENA and TalentIT career fairs will not be organised, but in October 2019, all Aalto University students will be able to network at a new recruitment fair.

About 60 employers and several hundred students attended this year's Aalto Summer Job Day. The exhibitors were able to build on the students’ perception of them as potential employers as well as meet face-to-face with Aalto students and discuss jobs with them. The event was held on Thursday 17 January 2019 at the Aalto University Undergraduate Centre in Otaniemi.

Summer jobs are being advertised and now is the time to apply for them

This time of the year is the busiest for summer job applications and the application window will close for many organisations by the end of February. A few randomly surveyed exhibitors at the event told us their thoughts on the subject.

According to Petri Poikolainen, Head of Development from Visma Software, their company has over 20 summer jobs for software developers. As Visma's customers are mainly Finnish public sector agencies, the employees must have good Finnish language skills. In addition to summer jobs, students can also apply for Visma’s Management Trainee programme, where, from the first day, the trainee is responsible for managing real projects in several strategic areas of the company.

Julia Heinämaa, a brand ambassador for the recruitment company Academic Work said that they have jobs available for young professionals who have 1-5 years of experience in their field. Heinämaa recommended that job seekers activate the Duunivahti job alerts which sends email alerts on jobs that meet the criteria they have set.

'Lidl offers summer jobs in almost all of their business functions. People often have the perception that jobs at Lidl are just in the stores, but we also have a number of summer vacancies at our head office in Niittykumpu, Espoo', said Lidl's HR specialist Tinna Kalajo. 'Even if you are a first-year student you could still land a summer job at Lidl. Previous experience in the retail industry is beneficial.'

Eemil Rantanen who is studying for a Master’s degree in Management and International Business at the School of Business hopes to get a summer job in HR. The field in which the company operates is less important to him. After chatting with few of the exhibitors at the event, Rantanen felt that there might be quite a lot of work opportunities available for the forthcoming summer.

In addition to being able to discuss summer job vacancies with the exhibitors, Aalto Summer Job Day offered students the opportunity to take a high-quality photo for their CV.

'I would like to thank all employers and students who took part in the Aalto Summer Job Day. The next time we will meet at least as such a large group will be on 31 October, when Aalto University’s first joint recruitment and career fair will take place in Otahalli'”, said Annemari Rautio, Senior Manager at the School of Business Career Services.