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Proud Partners: Accenture and AIESEC in Finland

AIESEC in Finland was happy to have our national partner ACCENTURE participating in one of our organization’s most important national seminars SUCCESS in late March. Held in Tampere, the seminar gathered over 120 members of AIESEC in Finland to learn about leadership, team working skills and to get to know people around Finland as well as other countries.

On Saturday, the second day of the three-day-seminar Accenture held a work shop on team management. Held by two active AIESEC alumni, Marko Niinistö and Vesa Silfver, the workshop had over 30 participants, members in different positions in AIESEC. Marko and Vesa have both had extensive careers in AIESEC: Marko, currently working as a Management Consultant at Accenture, was active on local and national level during the 90’s and Vesa during the late-90s and the first few years of the new millennium. AIESEC in Finland had the chance to have a small chat with Vesa about his time in the world’s largest student organization and about the cooperation between AIESEC and Accenture.

Proactive Leaders and the Tiger Attitude

“We noticed that there are quite a few AIESEC alumni working at Accenture in different positions. This discovery encouraged us to start discussing with our Human Resources department about different possibilities for Accenture’s and AIESEC’s cooperation.” Vesa Silfver says about the beginning of the partnership. Currently he works as a Management Consultant in Finance and Performance practice at Accenture. In AIESEC his career expanded from being a local committee president to working full time in the Finnish and Estonian member committees. Experienced in both the AIESEC work and the corporate world he can see the connection between the two entities:

“In AIESEC the members are encouraged to be proactive and they are able to learn about leadership in practice. This is appreciated in Accenture, as well. We support entrepreneurial and proactive attitude – or the Tiger attitude, as we call it - among our employees”, Silfver tells. He adds that responsible leadership and social responsibility are also common factors in the both organizations’ work.

Accenture: a Global Organization

Accenture is a global organization that offers its clients different consulting services, technology solutions and outsourcing services. For the third year in row Accenture has been selected as the best place to work in Finland. Even though Finnish language skills are required, the primary language at global Accenture is English and intercultural skills are highly valued:

“Our consultants work with people from diverse cultural backgrounds, thus good knowledge in different languages and cultures is an important characteristic among our employees. This is something where these two organizations are quite close to each other: we have acknowledged that the different cultural experiences that AIESEC gives to its members is a great help for young people to work in a multicultural environment”, Vesa Silfver notes.

The AIESEC Effect

Vesa Silfver says that his experiences with AIESEC motivated him to move his focus from technology to management studies and, later on, begin his work in Accenture. Vesa reckons also that his experiences in AIESEC were beneficial in getting to work for Accenture Public Services consulting. He listed some of the valuable learning experiences, such as team leading, facilitation skills and cultural experiences, which he got during his time in AIESEC.

“I would not say that my time in the organization directly taught me consultation skills. I would rather see that I got abilities to work with and understand people from different cultural backgrounds and I got certain confidence to work even in the most surprising situations. This was one of the reasons why my executives trusted me with demanding project roles early in my consulting career”, Silfver says.

Success 2009 was a great way for the two organizations to start the cooperation and AIESEC in Finland is looking forward for further working with Accenture.