Article by Wooden Oy
Russia is on the blacklist. China’s human rights, environmental issues and Taiwan raise big questions. Transport costs have increased. The awakening of consumers and companies to the necessity of sustainable development is present every day in everything we do and produce. But Europe holds the winner´s cards. Industry is moving back to Europe for the above reasons, now a new platform must be built for it. It cannot be achieved with the old methods, but when updated, the European industry is in good shape. We need new skills, new employees, and new technology.
In the last 10 years, about half of the carpentry shops have stopped operating in Finland, but at the same time the turnover of the companies has doubled. Company sizes have increased, and the efficiency of companies has improved. For this reason, the need for skills has changed. Larger and more efficient companies need different skills than small companies. In larger companies’ production control, digitalization, work planning and marketing is important. In small companies there is not necessarily a need or financial resources for these tasks. Engineers and production workers with higher skills are needed. Employees who strengthen internationalization are needed.
Finland has a great education system. We have university of applied sciences for management, Vocational school for manufacturing workers and workers’ college for enthusiasts. But where is the focus of education? In woodworking we are mostly educating artisans whose training is not so much focused on the manufacturing tasks of industry, but more on the needs of the craft industry. A change in the focus of education to where the tax euros needed for education are collected would now be necessary.
MOSAIC is a four-year EU-funded project of six countries for education in arts and crafts. It is one of the largest EU-funded education projects. Each country is represented by a vocational school, a university of applied sciences and one company. From Finland, Omnia from Espoo, LAB from Lahti and Wooden as a Finnish company representative. Through MOSAIC, a new kind of teaching thinking and workshops are launched to educational institutions in different countries. I was responsible for innovating and teaching the first pilot workshop in Lyon, France at the beginning of May.
During the week, the workshop combined digital graphic design with digital wooden furniture production. The graphic design teacher Susana Solórzano came from Barcelona Spain. I am from Espoo Finland, and I was responsible how to combine digital design and digital woodwork processes. Expectations and motivation to strengthen education and European industry are high.
