The latest Mentoring Night from Women in Tech, on 14th November, featured four speakers who shared their career paths with the audience, which were filled with incredible advice on how to grow the working life you want.
At the welcoming words of the host Nea Höynälä, Head of Marketing at Inklusiiv, the audience could grasp the importance of what the evening had ahead of them: mentoring and networking. Nea shared a personal anecdote going all the way back to her teenage years uncovering how she stumbled to find her first mentor in the last 15 minutes of a local startup event. Over time, he not only provided valuable career advice and served as a key reference, instrumental in securing her first job, but, perhaps most significantly, offered the confidence boost she needed.
Years later Nea asked him, ‘Why did you want to be my mentor?’- She was surprised when he answered that it was Nea, actually, who had mentored him. ‘What I learned from this story’, she shared, ‘is that mentoring actually always goes two ways, and mentors are not just found in boardrooms and corner offices, they are everywhere’.
Nea Höynälä, Head of Marketing, Inklusiiv
Continuing from those very encouraging initial words, the first speaker of the evening was Tuulikki Pöllänen, Global HSE & Sustainability Manager and Responsible Sourcing Lead at ABB. Tuulikki shared with the audience what are the three main key factors that supported her career growth, from the beginning up to the moment when she landed her dream job. The first key piece, for her, is networking: as a young trainee in the Netherlands during her exchange year, Tuulikki benefited from networking, and developing a mentoring relationship with her supervisor – through his mentoring, she landed her very first job in Finland, a maternity leave substitution in Shell Finland. When it comes to networking Tuulikki has very sound advice: nurture your networks, reach out to them even when you don’t need them, and treat them like a personal relationship that needs to be cared for.
After seven years in Health and Safety jobs at Shell, Tuulikki had the opportunity to try a position in Continuous Improvement. ‘Even though I didn’t know anything about Continuous Improvement, I had to quickly learn in order to train others about it’, she explained. ‘And there I had a supervisor who came to observe my training, and gave me continuous feedback afterward’, she recalls. This is the second key factor for her, the importance of feedback: reach out to those who can make you improve, since those are the ones who will help you develop and head in the right direction.
The third and last key factor for her is the importance of grasping our own values: we will most likely feel comfortable and keen on growing a career path that feels aligned with our own values. In Tuulikki’s case, returning to Finland after years of working abroad matched her values, because it meant being close to home, which was dear and meaningful to her. Just as well, working in sustainability for ABB matches her values: their operations, working culture, the presence and upholding of work, and psychological safety in the everyday life of the firm.
Tuulikki Pöllänen, Global HSE & Sustainability Manager and Responsible Sourcing Lead, ABB
Pauliina Luhtanen, Senior Vice President at Reaktor is the second inspiring speaker of the evening. She shares with the audience how for years, as a woman working in tech, she has felt the need to justify her career decision, when in fact, choosing tech has had simply to do with her own curiosity, and her own drive to explore beyond the mainstream. This is a good reminder: women in tech do not need justifications to make the move onto a less conventional career path.
Reflecting on her career, Pauliina notices how big moments of revelation took place for her when working with clients from Finland. It was then that she realized that she wanted a bigger challenge: working with people with different backgrounds and different domains, learning from people all over the world. ‘It’s all about people because people’s skills will definitely prompt your career forward’, she notes.
Drawing from her experience at Reaktor and the values that the company promotes, Pauliina illustrates what for her is the perfect recipe for professional growth in the workplace: a mixture of meaning –which naturally means different things for different people–, autonomy – a certain degree of freedom to make decisions–, and the capacity for growth –or tackling those moments that allow us to expand besides our comfort zone.
Pauliina shared with the audience four ‘giveaways’ or pieces of invaluable advice: first and foremost, she encouraged the audience to follow sometimes the mentality of ‘good enough’: we do not have to every time seek the perfect answer or the perfect solution, because it might fill us with fear. ‘Let’s not overanalyze every step we make, let’s just take it, it keeps the work flowing, which is what we need sometimes’, Pauliina recommends.
The second giveaway is to ‘work as close to customers as possible’, because in her words, ‘You’ll get to know first-hand what happens in the market’. Tied to that there’s the third key, which is the benefit of learning lateral skills sometimes, since it gives more freedom and possibilities to building a career. Finally, ‘Build, don’t rush’, advised Pauliina – even though there might always exist the feeling of someone being ahead, it does pay off to enjoy the journey and build our careers block by block.
Pauliina Luhtanen, Senior Vice President, Reaktor
Following Pauliina, the third speaker of the evening was Heidi Lavento, Chief Information Security Officer at Konecranes, who brought a different perspective to the audience by explaining how we perceive different perspectives from the same career path over the years: the perspective we see from ‘the inside’ filled with hard moments and challenges, and the one that we see in perspective as just a logical path of growth.
With a major in Organizational Communication and Leadership, she slipped into working life from a PhD position and started working in Communications in the tech field. These experiences helped her build transferable skills over those first years in order to gain the confidence and base to apply for her first job in Security. Since building transferable skills is indeed one of the best pieces of advice young professionals can get, a member of the audience followed up on that, asking Heidi: how do you find those skills inside oneself?
‘Self-reflection, that is the key’, says Heidi, ‘What do you do now, and what do you want to do in the future? and then think: what are the skills that exist in both moments?’.
Heidi Lavento, Chief Information Security Officer, Konecranes
The last speaker of the evening was Laura Telenius, HXM Solution Advisor at SAP Finland. She introduces not only her career story but also the stories of other three colleagues also working at SAP. From seeing those stories of Laura herself, Nella Kangas, Miia Raitala, and Tiina Antturi, the audience learned that these professionals have different backgrounds -some of them not related at all to tech, yet they all believe in SAP’s mission and purposes: enabling more sustainable futures.
Laura Telenius, HXM Solution Advisor, SAP Finland
