One of the goals of the Pirssi project is to create a clear and illustrative guide on important practices in working life. The guidance is targeted towards university students who are in transition to working life. This guide is called the Journey Planner (Reittiopas in Finnish).
Topics featured in the Journey Planner include finishing one’s studies, becoming an entrepreneur or a light entrepreneur, finding commissions or employment, figuring out one’s social security and maintaining one’s mental and physical well-being.
The goal of the Planner
The purpose of the Journey Planner is to provide information on the featured topics, so that the user will gain a comprehensive understanding of working life’s key elements and, thanks to this, can make career decisions based on factual information. In this sense, the Journey Planner resembles a map of a difficult terrain.
The Journey Planner is meant to work as an independent guide to the complications of working life, but it is also used as material in the study module organised by the Pirssi project.
The process of preparation
The Journey Planner was designed by a working group comprised of teachers and students from Tampere Universities. We set the work in motion in meetings in early 2020, but due to the Covid19 pandemic, we switched to remote work. With a task such as this, working remotely did not cause too many problems, although it might have slowed things down a bit. We worked in small groups, each of which had their own topic to focus on.
The project was pieced together reasonably well over the spring, but once autumn came around, we realised that we still had a lot of content to produce. And that we had to hurry. We wrote and wrote, and once the texts were ready for commenting, we sent them to the subject matter experts participating in the Pirssi project.
Seeing the bigger picture
A vital part of distributing information is its structure and visualisation, or in other words, how the information is presented. The Internet has abundant information on working life, but this information is scattered all over and usually compiled from a set perspective. Therefore, it can be arduous to form a comprehensive view. The Journey Planner attempts to rise to this challenge. We created a pilot version of the Journey Planner using the resources available at the moment. Feedback on the pilot version is still being collected, and the revised final version will be released in 2021.
The map versus the terrain
The goal of the Journey Planner is idealistic and ambitious: to compile the central elements of working life into a concise, easily comprehensible package. Within the project, we call it an ‘interpreter of the system’.
One fundamental challenge remains: presenting working life in one picture is a gargantuan task, if not completely impossible. As if that wasn’t enough, working life is under constant change. One should read Pirssi Reittiopas like a map depicting terrain: they are not identical images of each other, but like maps aid in orienteering, the Journey Planner can help one reach their destination when they transition into working life.
The Pirssi Journey Planner can be found at:
https://projects.tuni.fi/reitti/
(For the time being, in Finnish only)
Original text: Antti Haapio
This blog article has been translated into English by Tampere University students of multilingual communication and translation studies.