Hrry Blog

As things are changing it's time to get active on my personal blog again. I've been somewhat active in my work blog but that has been sitting inside the Nokia firewall so not that many people know about it. :)

I'm leaving Nokia - Like all big companies in this economic downturn Nokia is trying to save money. First it was travel, purchases and project budgets but when those weren't enough it was time for personnel reductions. My work with social media and ways of working wasn't really one of the core functions of the Human Resources (HR) department and probably didn't seem that important in a time of crisis so I was one of the "lucky ones" when the cuts came. Nokia is still doing well and wants to keep its personnel happy so they are offering a pretty good voluntary resignation package which I also took.

I worked for Nokia for altogether 8 years and it has been my only employer after graduation so it feels strange to leave the company. I've worked for a long time in the Nokia Research Center and then moved a couple of years back to HR. I was involved in a lot of very different initiatives and projects during my time at Nokia and my work role changed on the way from a research engineer designing and implementing things to being an expert in social software and media and looking after that area (unofficially). I guess I should write another blog entry about my career as there are just way too many things to list here. ;)

It was a shock to hear the news and to start thinking about what to do next - in retrospect I think it would have been good to do the thinking already earlier. :) Luckily my expertise is on a growing area and I was able to find a new job even before my Nokia contract ended. I'll be working as a consultant for a small Helsinki-based social media consulting company called Dicole (www.dicole.com) helping Finnish companies to use social media internally and externally. Dicole is the kind of firm I wished I had established myself and I'm really looking forward to working there. I've been doing consulting within Nokia for a couple of years already but I'm sure being a real consultant is different so it's a great learning opportunity for me as well. I'll start in my new job at the end of this month and will write about it more once I have some experience.

I'll try to blog more actively here from now on and also get involved in the social media and Web2.0 scene here in Finland. Even with the depression there seems to be exciting things happening in that space. I think we're living in interesting times both in the good and the bad. ;)