Trade Unions
First we had an overview of the history and activities of the trade unions. Below links to some Finnish unions worth looking at. The pages are not always in English, but the ERTO webpage gives a quite good list on reasons why people join the unions:
"10 reasons to join ERTO
- ERTO protects you interests in the labour market
- Influences labour legislation
- Provides training for members and shop stewards
- Offers support and assistance in the workplace through shop stewards
- Gives advice on employment contracts
- Provides legal assistance and free legal aid
- Pays unemployment benefits in case of lay-offs or unemployment
- Offers excellent insurance coverage
- Publishes a membership magazine 4 times per year
- Organizes union meetings and events and offers special discounts"
Viestinnän asiantuntijoiden ammattijärjestö
http://www.taj.fi/
Teatteri- ja Mediatyöntekijät ry
http://www.teme.fi/
Suomen Journalistiliitto in English
Union of Journalists in Finland
http://www.journalistiliitto.fi/en/
Federation of Special Service and Clerical Employees ERTO
http://www.erto.fi/english
Public sector and industry organisations
There are many international public and private organisations who collective statistics and data, also fund research about different professional fields. It is useful to have a look at them at times to know
the developments and trends of your field of business. Some examples:
OECD/Internet Economy
http://www.oecd.org/sti/interneteconomy/
European Audiovisual Observatory
http://www.obs.coe.int/
Online Publishers Association
http://opa-europe.org/
Professional organisations
The professional organisations of your field maintain very valuable information databases about events and reports of the field. One example of these is ACM, which has a vide range of SIGs, Specail Interest Groups. Maybe the most important for TAMK Media students is SIGGRAPH - Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, other relevant SIGs include SIGCHI - Computer-Human Interaction, SIGMM - Multimedia and SIGWEB - Hypertext and the Web.
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
http://www.acm.org/
and Siggraph
http://www.siggraph.org/
International Game Developers association
http://www.igda.org/
http://igda.fi/
http://score.igda.fi/
Neogames
http://www.hermia.fi/neogames/neogames_in_english/
Jobs and salaries
From Digibusiness.fi you can find most of the companies of the field in Finland, and on the Vierityspalkki.fi blog there are always a high number of jobs available, often in English.
Digibusiness.fi
http://www.digibusiness.fi/yritykset/
Vierityspalkki.fi (Scroll bar.fi)
http://vierityspalkki.fi/
Palkkavertailu.fi is a service where you can get an idea of salaries in different fields in Finland. The service is unfortunately in Finnish only, but you should know the key job titles in Finnish anyways.
Here you can find salaries of graphical designes:
http://palkkavertailu.com/palkka/graafinen%20suunnittelija
Festivals and Awards
Some festivals and awards have rich collections of interactive media projects on their websites worth to be looked at for inspiration.
Ars Electronica
http://www.aec.at/index_en.php
Pixelache
http://www.pixelache.ac/
The Webby Awards
http://www.webbyawards.com/index.php
World Summit Awards (Check also mobile and youth award)
http://wsis-award.org/
About Networks
I introduced some of my networks and explained how to do networking. It is not really about chatting over coctails and getting Facebook friends. Serious networking is serious and hard work. Exchanging business cards is only one step. After the first meeting you always have to contact the persons you really want to connect with, share some ideas about what you could do together, and if you have promised to send photos about your meeting send them! Always keep your promises!
I showed how and why I use LinkedIn as my main online tool to maintain and use the networks. Also showed what smart students have done.
My professional network map on LinkedIn Maps: (could show more in detail online as you can see on the image)
http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/share/Cai_Melakoski/
About Twitter
At the end of the session the students were divided in two parties: the Twitter users and non users. At this point the non-users were the majority.
The discussion was quite good, and Ziga Pavlovic demonstrated some great tools he uses to get more out of Twitter and other Social Media services.
Here you can find a guide made by IMPs last year.
http://tinyurl.com/ttvotwitter
This was a great and brilliant lesson!
ReplyDeleteI found out that most of those social networks however work only if you actively engage with them. I suppose it works the same with real life networking.
If you have some more links to useful apps or services, please do feed us!
Here are some useful Freelancing links:
ReplyDeletehttp://craigslist.org/
http://Behance.net/
http://elance.com/
http://dribbble.com/jobs
http://cargocollective.com/
For game people, this is an awesome network, I volunteered there as a designer last summer:
http://gameful.org/
HootSuite - social media aggregator where you can see streams from your networks and multiple accounts. Post and answer to all social networks from one place. Saves a lot of time and password clicking.
ReplyDeleteTweetDeck - If you're just using FB and Twitter or checking on your mobile phone this is a great tool to use.
Ifttt - It that, then that - "the" duct tape for the internet. For all those custom API connections you always wanted but couldn't program yourself. Use recipes from other users or make your own.
How to use Twitter - leaving this here, just in case.
oh, there's some awesome links with SNS apps :-)
ReplyDeleteAnother good place to find some job listings- and not just for those interested in working on the game industry, although it's quite focused on it- is the new job forums at conceptart.org:
ReplyDeletehttp://jobs.conceptart.org/
It's nicely organized by paid positions, freelance jobs, and even internship opportunities. A friend of mine has found some nice freelancing opportunities through the site.