External Relations: Focus on Business Cooperation
As in previous years, cooperation between Laurea and working life played a key role in 2024. Laurea had 1,065 active partners and received 1,819 working life-related assignments. Laurea has used a shared database to monitor its cooperation with working life for almost a decade. This system contains data on student projects, theses and other workplace development measures, and it produces detailed data on Laurea's societal impact.
Laurea graduates, or alumni, are an important stakeholder for Laurea. At the end of 2024, Laurea’s alumni with Bachelor's and Master’s degrees totalled almost 39,000. For more than a decade, Laurea has maintained a data bank of alumni lecturers in order to pass on their working life knowledge. It contains information on Laurea's alumni who are interested in lecturing at Laurea. During the year under review, the lecturer bank contained the names and details of around 1,000 Laurea alumni. In collaboration with its key partners, Laurea organised a series of alumni webinars on topical working life themes. On average, around 100 alumni took part in the events. The alumna of the year award was presented to Taru Tuukkanen, whose outstanding achievements included combining a career as a professional basketball player, family life and studies in Laurea’s Business Management degree programme.
Laurea’s advisory boards continued their regular collaboration. Laurea’s regional development mission is supported by three regional advisory boards: Espoo and Lohja, Central and Northern Uusimaa, as well as Vantaa and Porvoo. At their meetings, the advisory boards discussed Laurea's topical themes, including critical needs for change in the new strategy. Laurea’s International Advisory Board put its extensive expertise at Laurea's disposal to support the strategic development of Laurea’s operations during the final year of its term. Laurea’s Alumni Advisory Board supported education development at Laurea by contributing its workplace-related expertise and perspectives to it.
Since 2014, Laurea has conducted surveys to monitor the feedback it receives from its partners. As before, the strategic indicators monitored in the survey were at a good level. Laurea’s overall score was 4.1, with 79% of respondents indicating that they had already strongly recommend Laurea to others, or were prepared to do so. Those satisfied with Laurea accounted for 94% of the respondents. The survey also monitors Laurea’s key partners’ satisfaction, experiences, and expectations concerning the key partnership programme. Based on the survey, the feedback from Laurea’s key partners was good, and their level of satisfaction with the key partnership programme stood at 4.1. Laurea’s key partners praised Laurea’s versatile projects, the services provided by Laurea’s contact persons, their collaboration with Laurea students, and their close collaboration with Laurea itself.
Laurea’s key partnership programme is a fee-based service for working life that aims to deepen Laurea’s collaboration with businesses and support the connections its students have with working life. The key partnership programme attracted the interest of an even larger group of working life organisations. During the year under review, we signed 5 new key partnership agreements, and by the end of the year we had 106 key partners.
Teemu Ylikoski, Development Director
Key figures
Active partners during the year: 1,065
Workplace assignments: 1,819
Total number of key partners by the end of the year: 106