At last, after a year of ceaseless nomadism, the time has come for the Management Trainees to settle. In this blog post, the trainees describe their new positions, what they look forward to and point to challenges they will face in their new permanent role. You will be surprised to read that there has been a bit of a shuffle when it comes to nationalities and place of work. It goes to show that the Management Trainee program reveals many tempting cross-border opportunities in Visma!
Viktoria Vikan Hæsken
Title: Business Analytics Consultant
Location: Oslo, Norway
Business Unit: Visma bWise
Description: Visma bWise is part of the consultancy business of Visma. As a Business Analytics Consultant I will be working with large Norwegian companies, to create intelligent solutions based on their data warehouses, that boosts understanding and create business value. The role demands an understanding of finance and business, as well as the technical abilities to deliver user-friendly analysis.
What do I look forward to the most? I am very excited to learn how to handle Qlik – bWise’s most used analytics tool. Using my business background combined with new software knowledge, I’ll be able to enable data driven decision making for Visma bWise’s customers. Turning chaos into order is a truly satisfying feeling, and with experience, great discoveries about a business can surface. In addition, I am eager to become a part of Visma bWise’s inclusive, fun and inspiring work environment.
What will be challenging? Even though it is exciting, learning how to excel at a new software will be challenging. It takes some energy learning how the software is structured, what commands brings you to a result, and how the new script language works, when to use it and when to use other tools to manipulate the data the way you want it. However, I guess the difficulty and the learning process is a main driver to why it is exciting.
Anna Normark
Title: Data Analyst Manager
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Business Unit: Visma Commerce AB/AS
Description: Commerce is a part of Visma’s Enterprise division, and produces large amounts of data. I will work with data analytics and data management at Commerce. This means that I will analyse data, create data management solutions and help Commerce achieve more data driven strategies and ways of working. This role will help me develop my technical skills, but also let me work with change management, since working data-driven can be quite a change to some people.
What do I look forward to the most? I look forward to creating an environment that allows for more data-driven ways of working, and by doing so, improving the everyday work life of my coworkers. I also look forward to working more long term with my solutions. As a trainee, you get to experience many new things, but it’s intense and each project only lasts about two months. Now I will work on bigger projects and see how they improve over time
What will be challenging? I think many things with my job will be challenging, as it should be! Working with improve data use is in my experience always difficult. The application that needs to share data are often complex and creating best practice is rarely a trivial task. Furthermore, the transition from working as a trainee, with short, intense and independent projects will probably be challenging, but I’m ready for those challenges.
Eirik Mofoss
Title: Business Development Manager
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Business Unit: Visma Finance AB
Description: Visma Finance is a new startup and FinTech inside Visma, of great strategic importance for the whole Visma Group. We develop fully automated financial services primarily for businesses in the SMB segment. My role is partly assessing, planning and managing new projects and business cases, partly doing analytics and working on analytics and our credit models, and partly supporting our CEO and CFO. Having done one MT-project here, I already know the business and team very well.
What do I look forward to the most? I really look forward to work in a small and fast-paced environment, with competent colleagues, exciting business opportunities, and lots of expectations to what we can achieve. That makes me thrive at work. Also, I will learn a lot about banking and the financial sector from my experience colleagues, and about IT product development through working closely with market leading software companies.
What will be challenging? Developing products from scratch in a new company, with lots of stakeholders and partners, and high expectations both to quality and time to market, is obviously a challenge. Furthermore, there is still a lot of jargon, systems, regulation and processes that are completely new to me from both the banking and the IT sector. On the positive side, I will be “learning while doing”, and most likely never get bored.
Rebecca Oskarsson
Title: Data Analyst Manager
Location: Amersfoort, The Netherlands
Business Unit: Enterprise Division
Description: The Enterprise Division is one of Visma’s five divisions and works as an umbrella organization for approximately 25 business units.
I will be responsible for collecting, analyzing and interpreting data to identify improvements for the business, upsell possibilities, find cross-sale cases and prevent/predict churn within the Enterprise Division. Therefore, the work involves running projects, find and align data initiatives across the division and assist business units to become even more data-driven.
What do I look forward to the most? Except for moving to a whole new (for me) country? Well…
- Meet people all around Visma and learn their way of working
- Automate tedious processes
- Implement machine learning in a useful and value-adding way
- Improving business through smart use of data
- Learning more about Visma from a business perspective
What will be challenging? I will be challenged, that’s for sure. More precisely I believe these will be my biggest ones in the beginning.
- Aligning data initiatives and projects around the division
- Inspire others to see the value of data-driven processes
Jo Hvoslef
Title: Business Performance Manager
Location: Oslo, Norway
Business Unit: Tripletex AS
Description: Tripletex is a company that primary serves the lower SMB-market with an ERP-system in Norway. They were bought by Visma in 2016, and I was lucky enough to have my first Management Trainee project at their floor at the Visma HQ at Skøyen. My main responsibility is to run strategic projects across departments to continue our historical double-digit revenue growth and work closely with management.
What do I look forward to the most? First of all, I look forward to finally be a part of the Tripletex, as I believe they have a great culture and the right attitudes to be fit for the future in the accounting software market. Secondly, the fact that I can use my experience and Visma-network to support Tripletex with strategic improvements and create value-adding impacts is something I look forward to.
What will be challenging? The shift in mindset from being a trainee to a fixed position. As a trainee, you are used to 2 months on a project on one topic. In Tripletex, I’ll have longer and multiple projects across departments, and be offered to run other as well. Therefore I believe another challenge is the ability to make clear prioritizations in order to ensure that you spend your time aligned with your main responsibility.
Jacob Nyman
Title: Optimization Consultant
Location: Oslo, Norway
Business Unit: Optimization Technologies
Description: As Optimization Consultant, I will be responsible for the successful commercialization of optimization and artificial intelligence applied to mission-critical operational tasks such as scheduling and timetabling. In my first project, me and an Optimization Specialist will model and solve the nurse rostering problem, host the algorithm on AWS and provide a REST API that, in response to a problem instance, returns a completed nurse roster of super-human quality.
What do I look forward to the most? I look forward to being part of a supportive team where all team members are enthusiastic about the way we innovate society. I truly believe that we can achieve great things with our current methodology where we work closely with domain experts and end-users. Finally, I am so excited to see how the team will grow with so many new talents coming in for internships and settling in the team!
What will be challenging? It will be challenging to obtain and maintain the diverse set of skills needed to create value in so many parts of the value chain. In a single day as Optimization Consultant, it is expected that I should be able to function, depending on the setting, as a business consultant, infrastructure engineer, full-stack developer and optimization specialist. Challenge accepted!
Julia Hakanpää
Title: Business Development Manager
Location: Oslo, Norway
Business Unit: Enterprise Division
Description: Being part of the Enterprise Division’s business development team, I will work with mergers and acquisitions and see how Visma executes a core part of the company strategy and expansion from a close distance. In this role, I will be responsible for the onboarding and integration of new acquisitions into Visma as well as be part of the due diligence activities during acquisition processes.
What do I look forward to the most? I look forward to working in a small and dynamic team and learning more about the acquisition process and strategy of Visma. The role requires quite a lot of traveling, negotiation skills, getting to know a lot of new people and being able to adapt to different situations which I am excited about. Researching new markets and acquisitions means that I will get to expand my network globally.
What will be challenging? Since I moved from Helsinki to Oslo recently, the biggest challenge will be accommodating to a new home country. During the trainee year I did projects in business units only, which differs from the perspective of the division level. Here, the challenge is to be able to have a clear big picture of the BUs and their products in order to be able to spot new possible acquisitions that fit our portfolio.
Alexander Geisler
Title: Sales Strategy Manager
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Business Unit: Visma e-conomic A/S
Description: Visma economic is offering accounting solutions to the SMB market in Denmark, where it has been a dominant player for many years. Here I’ll be working in sales, where I’ll be highly involved in the strategic decisions being made in sales. The role has three main areas of responsibility; accelerating sales growth, improve sales efficiency and quality, and project management and execution of strategic initiatives.
What do I look forward to the most? I’ve already had two projects at Visma e-conomic during the Management Trainee year, but I look forward to becoming an integrated part of the business. Visma e-conomic has a unique culture, and I’m excited to become a part of the organization and meet all my new colleagues. Despite Visma e-conomic being leading in the market, we still have high growth ambitions and I look forward to making my mark on this journey.
What will be challenging? I’ll be working across our three sales teams and on multiple projects at the same time. I therefore believe, it will become challenging to figure out where my resources are spend the best, and where they will bring the most value to the organization. For that reason, project prioritization is one of my key focus areas and something that I will evaluate on an ongoing basis.