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Second-year master's student in Information and Service Management Markus Hirvola began his internship at Posti at the beginning of April, when the coronavirus pandemic was picking up speed. Regardless of the circumstances, Markus’s internship has been going well.

What are your work tasks like at Posti?

I work as a trainee at Transval Sales&Operations Planning (SO&P) unit, which is Finland’s market leader in logistics outsourcing. My tasks include reporting on different projects that deal with data analysis in a Power BI environment. These projects are related to for example S&OP predictions, invoicing reporting and resourcing. My tasks have been very data-driven so I have become very familiar with preparing data models and visualizing data during the summer. During my internship I have learned a lot about the S&OP euro area and the monthly execution of the S&OP process.

What is your normal workday as a trainee like?

My normal (remote) workday includes a status update meeting with the team, where we go through tasks that we have finished, and discuss future ones. Depending on the week, I might also be attending a monthly meeting about the S&OP prediction update, where we go through what the business will look like for each of the warehouses during the next one to twelve months.

Often, I spend most of my day working independently on Power BI reports. In addition, our 10-people trainee group has weekly Teams-meetings where we get to share our internship experiences.

What is the best thing you have been able to do during your internship?

Being involved with the S&OP updates has been especially fascinating – it has been interesting to see how the S&OP process is carried out in practice. Analyzing data using Power BI has been interesting. The experience will definitely come in handy in the future, and will likely help with other BI-tools too.

As a part of the trainee program, Posti has also arranged many meetings for us, where we have been able to hear about interesting topics from experts that work on different fields across the corporation. It has been fascinating to hear about some of the automation and AI projects Posti has currently underway, for example.

How have you been able to utilize your studies during the internship? What has been especially useful?

In addition to basic understanding of business, I have found the comprehension of different database and BI-tools to be especially useful in my daily work. These include for example MySQL, Analytics and Python.

Has something surprised you during the internship?

This may sound like a paid advertisement, but during my internship I have been amazed by how big and interesting corporation Posti actually is. This large company with a long history withholds many growing business units, as well as many interesting job tasks and development opportunities. I was also surprised about the amount of data Posti and Transval have, and how much that data influences the decision-making processes.

What would you like to say to students that are thinking about applying for an internship?

If a trainee program or an internship position interest you, you should go ahead and apply! You do not have to be an expert at everything when applying for an internship, eagerness to learn and improve yourself help a lot. Through an internship you get to meet new people and learn about their career paths. You will also get a better perception about skills needed in working life. Therefore, an internship can help you see what kinds of useful skills you have already learned at school, and what you should continue studying further in the future.