Study visit to Kreab

On March 18th, a group of English Translation students from the University of Helsinki visited The Kreab Group offices in Helsinki. Kreab is a global advisory firm with consultants of 40 nationalities in 25 countries. They are experts in financial, corporate, and public affairs communications worldwide. The group briefly met Matti Saarinen, Senior Partner and Chairman of the Board. Then they were hosted by Jan Erola, Associate Director who made a presentation about Kreab operations with concrete examples. He talked about what they do and how they do it.

KreabstudentpictureJan Erola presented various aspects of Kreab’s business activities. He talked about how the company assists in communications during large corporate mergers. He showed a list of many of the largest corporate mergers in Finland in recent years where they had assisted and explained what they do and how they do it.

He also talked about some of the public advocacy campaigns that they had done. One example would be attempting to change Finnish views toward Estonian health care. Modern Estonian health care is similar to Finnish standards and the doctors and staff there can speak Finnish because many have received training in Finland. The problem is that many Finns think that it is still like it was in the Soviet Union. New European Union regulations allow citizens to get certain treatments in other countries. So, Estonians would like to attract Finns. They explained how they made a campaign to change the image of Estonian hospitals in Finland.

There was a lot of discussion about traineeships. Kreab translates annual reports and translation students would be ideal to assist in this and with other projects. The study visit was interesting as well as enlightening and we thank Kreab for inviting us.

Text: Mike Garant