Alumna Noora Kinnunen: Studying marketing provided me with broad opportunities for my future career

Tell us about your career path so far.

I started working in my own field during my studies at an internship in a digital marketing agency early in the year 2014. I found the advertisement for the internship on the Aalto University CareerWeb. After the internship, I got a permanent position at the agency.

In 2017, I changed jobs to work at Alma Media. I started as a Marketing Planner, from which I proceeded to work as a Digital Marketing Specialist. Now I am a Product Manager at Alma Consumer Services unit.

How did you end up working for Alma Media?

I just saw an interesting job advertisement and decided to apply. Alma Media was a very interesting employer to me.

What have been the most important and most useful things in your studies?

Definitely the most useful were the courses in which we could work on real-life cases for the corporate partners. From those, I gained lots of practical knowledge to supplement the theory learned before. The real-life cases also taught to understand more clearly how the things we studied are linked to the challenges in the work life.

Another important aspect was the development of performance and argumentation skills. Even though it was rather unpleasant to perform in front of the whole class, learning and developing those skills have been very crucial later on, as the amount of having presentations in the work life has not decreased.

As the third important part, I would mention people. In the School of Business, you meet people who you will probably meet also later on in the work life, and having studied in the same facility and during the same time has been very helpful in these meetings.

Would you do something differently during your studies?

I could have been more active in different activities. There are for sure many services and events provided by the School of Business I missed. I would choose more courses where you can work with the real-life cases.

This year, we are organizing for the first time an Aalto-wide recruitment fair, where you are also attending as the company representative of Alma Media. During your studies, did you participate in the ARENA career fair organized in the School of Business? How did you benefit from the fair?

I did participate in the ARENA fair during my studies. The most useful thing was to meet company representatives and to hear how they had ended in the positions. It was also interesting to learn about the various career paths of the former students of the same major. It widened my own perspective and gave me ideas for my future job hunting.

Why should the students come to meet the employers at the Aalto Talent Expo recruitment fair?

You will get concrete information on various jobs and the employers you are interested in. At the same time, you will learn about different career paths, organizational culture, management practices and recruitment processes in different organizations.

How can a student take the best advantage of the recruitment fair?

Take a look in advance at the employer list who will be present at the fair and think about the employers you are interested in. Think about the things that you would like to know about the organizations and different job descriptions – then you just have to go and meet the employers at the stands!

Further information:

Get to know Noora’s career path more closely on LinkedIn!