HAMK Staff week 2020 - Creating services for tomorrow’s higher education

Digital Services for Students and Applicants – from the very first idea of applying until the day you graduate

In Finland, we organise things together and that is why we have such good digital services for our students and applicants. Before the students are even applicants, they can go to a national digital service called Studyinfo.fi that includes information about all higher education degree programmes offered in Finland. When applicants find an interesting programme, they can apply to the programme via this system during application periods. The next phase is the digital entrance examination that Finnish universities of applied sciences organised together for the first time in autumn 2019. Once the student is admitted to the university, HAMK equips the students for the upcoming studies with a Digital Starter Kit. We use a versatile set of digital tools for guiding our students during their studies, just to mention a few: Learn platform, Student Desktop, Zoom videos, O365, Yammer and our own HAMK App. Come and join us if you want to learn more!

HAMK has recently reorganised its international services from decentralised to centralised services and also widened the service palette. HAMK International is responsible for guidance related to student and staff mobility, for partnerships, for supporting the internationalisation of education and also contributes to the integration of international students at HAMK. HAMK International also offers modules to incoming exchange students and to HAMK students going abroad. In guidance related to mobility, the focus is on the competences the student gains during the exchange period. In the service provision of HAMK International, the student is in the centre.

HAMK International would like to share the promotion campaigns and events it organises to encourage students to go on exchange and to offer the opportunity for colleagues to learn and benchmark from each other. We would like to discuss the different ways of organising international services in the framework of university strategies. We wish to offer a platform for sharing different processes and practices in mobility guidance and to discuss the on-going preparations for Erasmus Without Paper.

Join us for sharing best practices, benchmarking and networking!

HAMK human resources service operates on the strategic level to maintain, steer and develop the organisation’s human resources. We are responsible for payroll, human resources development, recruitment, work wellbeing and HR applications. We are eager to constantly develop our work and would love to share our experiences and to hear about yours!

Welcome to our track!

Our aim is to give you a good perspective to our activities, possibilities and challenges of digitalization, but most importantly to provide you a possibility to network with your European colleagues. We hope to see you in May!

Our story

General information about our operating environment  

We will present you how the education system and funding are arranged in Finland. We are publicly funded university, but the amount of funding depends on our performance. We will tell what kind of requirements this sets to our activities in Financial Services.

Digitalization in Financial Services 

Digitalization helps us to provide modern services to our customers and to develop our processes further. We will tell you our story: what benefits we have gained by using modern tools, but also the challenges we have faced. In addition to technical aspects there is always resistance of change which we must tackle. We will tell you how we have overcome obstacles which we have faced. We are also looking into future and will discuss about our next development projects.

What are our services and how we manage them? 

Our core task in Financial Services is to provide accurate accounting data in expected timeframes, but there are a lot of other activities we do and services we produce. We aim to be advisors instead of officers! We will tell you about internal accounting, project accounting, financial reporting, budgeting and about our process of public procurements and risk management.

Workshop

Our track is not about us, its about you! After the introduction to our activities, and discussion about yours, we will have workshops where we divide participants to effective working groups. You have excellent opportunity to get to know your European colleagues and create your vision regarding these subjects.

• Professional 2030 

What traits and skills do you need in 2030 working as professional in financial services? What are the biggest challenges we face in the future? How this all affects to the relationship of supervisor and employee?

• University as a workplace of a professional 

Why university is a great place to work for professionals of financial management? What are the challenges compared to private sector? How could we attract talented employees to work with us?

Track A: Serving outside service hours, are chatbots a solution?

Would chatbots help us to serve customers outside service hours? What kind of problems can chatbot help with and when are other tools better? Chatbot is always there for you but it cannot understand complexed questions.

In HAMK library we are using chatbot to answer the most frequently asked questions. If you are interested in how to train chatbots and what role the chatbot can have in customer service, join our workshop. Not only library personnel but also those interested in making the most of chatbots are welcome to this workshop.

Track B: Strengthening research, baby steps and giant leaps

In our workshop: “Strengthening research, baby steps and giant leaps” we will concentrate on developing research services for tomorrow’s HE institutions.

In HAMK library and research support services we are interested in finding solutions to support applied research and new researchers at the beginning of their career. If you share this interest and you are willing to network, benchmark and share knowledge and best practices with colleagues all over Europe on these subjects, you are warmly welcome.  Not only library personnel but also those working in research support services are welcome to this workshop.

Track A: International student recruitment

How to recruit students on a global scale? How to work with agents? What are the best practices for international student recruitment? What do international students think when they apply and how do they choose their destination?

If you have any questions in mind, you are welcome to join our international student recruitment track.

Participating in this track will be most beneficial for you if you are:

• experienced or interested in marketing and international student recruitment;
• prepared to share good practices and contribute to the discussions.

Track B: Communicating research, development and innovation

How to communicate projects regarding research, development and/or innovations? In this track we will concentrate on different communicative content and means, e.g. publishing, newsletters, blog posts and social media, and talk about target groups and stakeholder communication.

Participating in this track will be most beneficial for you if you are:

• experienced or interested in communicating research, development and innovation, publishing and/or project coordinating;
• prepared to share good practices and contribute to the discussions.