Alumni Ambassadors are voluntary members of the Alumni Association who help students with issues of working life based on their own experience and expertise. Alumni Ambassadors can e.g. evaluate resumes, answer students’ questions about job hunting or sector-specific skills, help students identify their own skills, or recommend job and internship positions. The Alumni Ambassador service aims to promote student employment by offering the possibility of low-threshold communication between students and experienced alumni on their own terms, regardless of time and place.
Alumni Ambassador activities are faster and lighter than traditional mentoring: the alumni are not required to train for the task and do not commit to anything for a longer period of time, and they can also choose the channels through which they can be contacted. All that is required of an Alumni Ambassador is a desire to share their knowledge with students and to commit to answering the questions they receive to the best of their knowledge – or, if necessary, to tell that “right now I don’t have time to help”. For students, the service offers the perspectives of alumni with versatile experience and help for specific mind-boggling issues of working life.
Students and volunteer alumni can join the service on the website of the Alumni Association. The Alumni Association ensures that all those participating in the service are members of the Alumni Association or current or recently graduated students of the University of Helsinki. Everyone who joins the service receives detailed operating instructions, and students contact their chosen Alumni Ambassador based on the information they provide about their career and skills. After this, the alumni and the student continue to communicate in the way they see fit, until the student has received help with the problem that was bothering them.
The aim of the Alumni Ambassador service is to get the students of the University of Helsinki to find employment faster and in positions better corresponding to their education, utilizing the expertise that active alumni have accumulated in working life. A similar operating model has been found to work, e.g. at Harvard, where alumni activities have a long tradition. The Alumni Association strives to develop the service based on the experiences of users, and we therefore ask all registered alumni and students to give feedback using the form sent to them.