• Home
• What we do
• Study tours
• Contact us

Management Development in Finland

Why Finland?

50 years ago, Finland was primarily an agrarian society. Today Finland is winning accolades in many business ranking. The World Economic Forum has rated Finland as one of the top two most competitive countries in the world for the last three years and high tech companies like Nokia have proven that Finland is the world leader in information and communication technology.

Because Finland has quickly embraced new communications technology, with 67% Internet penetration and over half of the population owning mobile phones, this gives Finland a very good infrastructure which enables all kinds of multidisciplinary cooperation. Another area in which Finland excels is education. PISA, The Programme for International Student Assessment, is a three-yearly appraisal of 15 year olds in the principal industrialised countries, organised by the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2003, Finnish 15 year olds were first in reading literacy, maths, and science.

This ranking is perhaps most important in terms of human resource development. Management training is first-class because Finnish know-how is in demand. The same World Economic Forum ranked Finland first in the industrialized world for education and training and found that 'Finland’s top ranking is remarkable for its durability over time'. However, despite the recent success and high investments in research and technology, important challenges remain in turning these technological competencies into new internationally successful businesses required to generate new wealth and employment.

Management Training is a very important part of business life in Finland, mainly due to the government preoccupation with the growth and internationalisation of business. According to Statistics Finland, SMEs account for a large share of the strength of the Finnish economy. In 2003, internationalization was highlighted as one of the key issues for Finnish science and technology policy by the Science and Technology Policy Council of Finland. We will hear about internationalisation again and again in Finland. The next step for Finnish SMEs is to create companies that have very strong management teams that can grow into international exporters.

Entrepreneurship and SME training is to a large extent funded by public organisations. There are some very large and strong private sector organisations that work with large and small companies, as well as with public sector employees.

Finland has a large number of organisations that provide training services to SMEs, and interestingly, many of these organisations have been founded by employer groups or industry associations. What this means is that many of the courses are demand driven by industry itself, rather than by the government.

Find out more about this tour: