Skills Management – a hot topic in Finnish consulting companies

Cinode, the top Skills Management platform in Northern Europe, has quickly acquired several prominent Finnish brands such as Vincit, Silo.AI, and Wunderdog as clients, along with unnamed major listed players.

We reached out to Kimmo Kärkkäinen, our Country Manager in Finland, to learn more about the growing importance of digitizing consulting businesses and the achievements in Finland.

You meet a lot of leaders in the Finnish consulting industry – what challenges do they see in the market today?

– Well, we’re all living and doing business in an environment where unpredictable major shifts happen – the world will shake up individual lives and companies quite heavily at times.

Outside of the macro environment, the biggest challenges in the consulting industry are in talent management: how to find talent to deliver projects, how to retain the talent and keep the talent pool well-positioned to perform in the changing marketplace.

Depending on the cycle and specific company, the challenge could also be finding projects for the experts to work on.

Why is Skills Management a hot topic for Consulting Firms in Finland?

– The consulting industry is a prototype of how work will be organized in the future, with project-based work and teams assembled based on the required skills.

However, even within the consulting sector, teams can still be formed based on factors such as location, the project manager’s recall, perceived expert skills, promptness to respond to Slack or emails, etc.

This lack of structure and visibility can cause issues like:

• Failing to respond to proposal requests due to perceived unavailability of matching talent
• Paying for external talent when the same skill is present in-house
• Talent attrition due to not getting to work on desired projects (if sales teams lack easy access to available skill and ambition data, they rely on memory)
• Difficulty in forecasting project delivery beyond the next 2 weeks

I could go on.

What is the benefit of using a Skills Management platform for consulting companies?

– Skills Management aims to help organizations better manage this messy and ever-changing project work process. No software tool can eliminate all problems, but many aspects can be greatly improved, especially transparency, which has a direct impact on the organization’s operating speed.

You have seen a great growth of customers in the Finnish market during last year. What makes Cinode unique in the Finnish Market and why do customers choose it?

– The visibility we offer in the staffing process sets us apart. The success of a consulting firm depends on knowing the necessary skills for projects and the available skills, and making fast, informed decisions that benefit the company, customer, and expert.

Having relevant allocation information easily accessible to the entire company is critical and leads to increased margins, satisfied customers, and content talent.

Our platform offers a comprehensive solution with a strong CV handling system and tools for managing employee growth and development plans. This combination makes us a perfect fit for consulting companies, offering support from tactical to strategic levels.

Where do you see Cinode’s position in Finland in the next two years?

– I would love to see us help create a consulting company ecosystem, as we’ve done in Sweden. I believe we have the right kind of approach to this.

We have a kick-ass platform that can support companies from startups to enterprises, with proven success – and importantly, we are focused on providing the software platform, we don’t operate an expert network of our own, which means there are no conflicts of interest even when serving a wide group of organizations.