This is the third consecutive year that academic staff from the university have done so. This time, the lecturers from the Faculty of Economics and the Faculty of Information Technology got the chance to familiarise themselves with the work of various bank teams over the course of two months, depending on their interests. This ranged from human resources management and employee development and training at the Swedbank Academy through to cyber security and data science. The internships included classic job shadowing, participation in meetings and independent tasks.

The lecturers who took part were unanimous that the experience had given them a broader view of their field and helped them understand more deeply what students and businesses expect of the university. So what did the lecturers think were the most useful lessons they learned while working in the bank, and what will they share from it in their lectures and with their colleagues?

Internships broaden your horizons and remind you of the fundamentals

Marianne Kallaste, a lecturer in entrepreneurship in the Department of Business Administration, worked with the Swedbank Academy team. She says:

“I’ll definitely be sharing with my colleagues the experience I gained in planning and managing innovative processes. It’s important to link new initiatives to existing activities and to get different target groups involved. That’s pretty elementary stuff, but people tend to forget about it in everyday life. That’s why interning in a different environment is so valuable: it broadens your horizons and reminds you of the fundamentals.

Now I can be even bolder in marrying theory and practice in my teaching work, because they’re complementary, not mutually exclusive. Students often say that theory’s a thing in its own right and isn’t related to everyday activities. But what I experienced in Swedbank in terms of a research-based approach to planning activities in practice gave me extra incentive to combine research and practical tasks in my teaching.”

Stronger links between higher education and employers

Kristiina Hakk, a lecturer in probability theory and mathematical statistics at the IT College, shadowed a number of IT teams in Swedbank. She says: “In the rapidly changing, ever evolving world of IT, fresh practical experience is essential for lecturers. Real-world experience in a big company gives you a better understanding of the rationale behind key strategic decisions that take the current situation into account, as well as of the tools and methodologies that are actually used to solve problems and complete tasks. I’m sure job-shadowing in particular will help me focus on the right areas when it comes to supervising and assessing students’ dissertations and better prepare graduates for entering and making a success of themselves on the labour market. Plus every programme reinforces the links between the employer and the university.”

The feet-on-the-ground effect

Mart Roost, a lecturer in enterprise modelling and transformation in the Department of Software Science, says: “I think the greatest value of an internship is that you get to know the different aspects of the day-to-day work in a big international company. Among the many things I learned and experienced, I’ve taken from it a deeper understanding of the flexible planning and organisation of the continuous development of business services and IT systems with virtual self-organising teams based on the Scaled Agile Framework. A similar approach ought to be taken at the university level, for example in the coordinated development of a specific curriculum and its subjects.

Practical experience is needed to assess the relevance of the topics being taught and learned and to link them to real-life examples. When you see a method that’s being taught – or isn’t yet being taught, or that you’ve only read about – work in an actual company, it produces the feet-on-the-ground effect. It means you’ll be able to pass it on to students in a more illustrative and convincing way, and motivate them to investigate further on their own.”

Community members from every background are important

Shaymaa Khalil, a PhD student and junior researcher in the Department of Software Science, learned how Swedbank approaches cybersecurity. She says:

“It was my first ever internship, and I found it fascinating. I’d never thought I could still do work experience in my 40s.

While I do have experience of working in a company, every organisation has its own processes and way of going about things. The Swedbank internship meant I could see for myself how demanding and restrictive IT security is in the banking sector compared to other domains. The banking industry has a lot of regulations and requirements. That makes it ideal for learning about cybersecurity,

which is a rapidly growing area that lots of organisations are involved in and one in which it’s impossible to separate research from everyday corporate work. Spreading cybersecurity knowledge requires the expertise of the entire community, which is to say people from academic and business backgrounds alike.”

But what says the mentor?

Swedbank data scientist Lehar Oha supervised the internship programme. He invited Mahdi Taheri, a PhD junior researcher in the Department of Computer Systems, onto a data science team project to evaluate a language model. The team are involved in the development of AI systems. Oha says the internship was mutually (and hugely) beneficial: “Together we evaluated the performance and the pros and cons of language models, we reviewed scientific literature, we looked into assessment tools, we constructed assessment datasets and had lots of fun discussions. I appreciated Mahdi’s fresh and very insightful perspective and positive attitude. I look forward to taking part in similar programmes with my colleagues in the future.”