Nikita Cherkashin

Digital Transformation | Marketing | Business Consulting

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How I realized my childhood dream and saved £12,000 on British education along the way

This is a first post on my experience studying in the UK and Finland as an international student. I will explain what made me study abroad and how I saved £12,000 on business education.

Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. A strange music taste for a grade schooler from Siberia. I remember recording Come Together on my Nokia 3205i, setting it as a ringtone, explaining to my classmates what the heck is that and then sending them the song via infra-red port. At that time it never crossed my mind I could actually go to England, the home of my favourites. Western countries seemed unreachable. It all changed in 2010 when I first visited London with my dad. This trip became really an eye-opener for me and an idea of going to study abroad was planted to my mind.

In 2014 I graduated high school and moved to Moscow to study management at the biggest aerospace university in Russia. However, being lectured by former Soviet professors with little understanding of modern business wasn’t really my thing. I decided drop out and move to Finland. Why Finland? It was the only country where I could study business in English for free, so Finland was a no-brainer for me. Being a die-hard libertarian I also liked an idea of experiencing life in a so called socialist Nordic Model society.

Business course at Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences also had one considerable advantage. It was a double-degree. Meaning students have to spend one year at a partner university and get two diplomas upon graduation. When I checked the partner list I was thrilled to find British universities there, I got a step closer to my dream of studying and living in the UK, while keeping both of my kidneys. Amazing, innit?

Fast forward to January 2019. I already completed my courses at the University of Wolverhampton, spent summer working in London, met a lot of great people and had some of my life’s best experiences. I also paid nothing for a degree that would cost an international student £12,000 a year in tuition fees. What I think is important to understand here is that your passion may manifest itself very weirdly and your childhood interest may become a great source of motivation and drive to succeed in life. I am very lucky to have this kind of experience and I hope people can get some inspiration from my story to follow their own dreams.

P.S.: And of course I visited the Casbah Club and the Beatles Museum in Liverpool.


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PwC Audit-Consultant Interview

Today we are going to have a conversation with a recent graduate and audit-consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Artemiy politely agreed to answer popular questions and outlined his path to a desired career.

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Good to have you here! Tell us a little bit about yourself. What is your background?

Thanks for inviting me! I am Artemiy, in my twenties I’ve already lived in four Russian cities, of which two are located in Siberia. Back in school I was an ordinary guy interested in programming, reading and football. For now, I have completed my bachelor’s degree in Quality Management at Tomsk State University. During my studies at the TSU, I participated in a couple of competitions, notably Banks Battle, got to semi-finals, also more well-known Global Management Challenge with quarter-finals. Shortly after graduation I moved to Saint-Petersburg, where I applied for an internship at KPMG, but wasn’t preparing properly and didn’t get there. Later, this experience helped me to get to KPMG’s online course called Foundation for Graduates, which was really useful. During recruiting process I understood the specifics of every company within so called Big Four (PwC, EY, Deloitte, KPMG). I decided to head to Moscow for better career perspectives within Big Four. I applied to PwC and successfully got in. Why PwC you’d ask? I have a bunch of friends in Moscow office, who recommended the place for its corporate culture.

That’s really fascinating! Could you tell us about your company and audit in general.

Not sure if PricewaterhouseCoopers needs any introduction here, it is the largest professional network in the world. We provide audit, advisory, assurance and consulting services. In a couple of words, audit is an activity undertaken to evaluate whether the company’s financial statements match the real financial situation at an organization. PwC provides audit services to the largest players in the Russian and CIS markets.

Impressive! Now can you give any insights on how to get into PwC? Did you have any internships?

Carefully crafted CV is a must, if you want to pass the screening stage. Even if your background isn’t quite stunning you can lay it out in a manner that HR manager will got interested. To improve your CV, look for successful candidates’ CVs on the Internet and learn from the best. It is obvious, but never lie on your CV. If you have been invited to the interviews stage, now it’s time to show your A-game. I suppose, I got my interview, since during my studies at the TSU I completed an internship at “Gazprom Neft-East”, I optimized delivery time and analyzed value chain using lean production for logistical support. This experience helped me to pass screening and have something to talk about on the interview with HR.

Any tips on how to pass the actual interview?

If you have passed an interview with HR, you are going to have interviews with three different managers, forty minutes each. How you fit into the organization and the knowledge you possess have both about 50% influence on the final decision. If you are an accounting major, you better to be extremely good, if you are any other major you have to demonstrate general understanding and the ability to think on the fly, if you successfully do that, interviewer will understand that you are a person capable of learning all the required skills in a short period of time. Concerning the “fit” part of the interview, don’t hesitate to ask your HR manager what you should work on, in order to be prepared for the interviews with managers.

Would you describe your plans and aspirations?

I have gotten to a place I wanted to be a part of. So, my career plan is to grow within the PwC. However, PwC isn’t only audit, if you’re not interested in this career path, you have a wide range of options within the organization. You might be interested in applying to operational consulting department, corporate finance or any other. There are young law grads who went to tax department and became quite successful in the field. So, I think you should carefully consider your interests and learn about different options!

Thank you for answering the questions and contributing to the community of Helsinki Financial Club! We would love to see you again!

Thanks for having me! Don’t hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn.

If you would like to see more interviews and materials like that – become a member of Helsinki Financial Club, sign up on Facebook and share the post.

Disclaimer: All views and opinions presented here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect official position of the PwC.

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3 Rules of Exceptional Snapchat Content

Snapchat has been a hot thing for a couple of years, Facebook offered $3 billion to acquire the messenger but was turned down, obviously people and businesses want to get something out of this emerging trend. Teenagers are no longer the only people you can Snapchat with, the demographic is expanding steadily, more and more people use the app. In this blog post I’ll share three the most powerful tips on how to create quality content in Snapchat. So, here’s the Snapchat’s three driving forces 🙂

Rule #1 – Push it to the limit.

Use all the tools available to you. Nobody’s interested in looking at plain selfies or coffee cups, that is what the Instagram for. Some people like to add all the possible filters, watermarks and logos on their Instagram content, which is usually quite annoying, but the Snapchat is a different thing. You can have fun here, draw on photos, put some text and emojis. Get creative!

Rule #2 – Use Snapchat Stories.

You can entertain your audience by creating funny and cool series of videos and photos, which can be seen by all of your followers on Snapchat. On the other hand, your simple Snaps could be seen only by chosen receivers. So, don’t limit your reach – post Snapchat Stories. One very interesting distinction between Snaps and Stories is that you can check who exactly has seen your Stories out of all followers.

Rule #3 – Be consistent and post daily.

When you already got some followers, the key to success is to post daily, since your visibility correlating only with your recent activity. If you stop using the app people won’t be able to see your content, cause it is disappearing in a couple of hours. So, you really have to be active to be noticed. It is easy to make Snaps and Stories, so in order to keep up with your schedule just try to squeeze Snapchat in your daily routine. Though some businesses or individuals may get trapped in posting boring stuff, this is a bad tactic since you will lose loyalty.

Snap me, if you liked this post!

Share your experience using Snapchat in comments.

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Nik Cherk at Snapchat

 

 

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Asana – Collaborative Information Manager

It’s no secret that internal communication is extremely important for any business striving to operate efficiently. In this blog post, I’d like to share my opinion on task management software, which I had an opportunity to use.

We used an application called Asana. It was developed by a team of Facebook ex-employees  Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, they both worked on increasing the productivity of employees at Facebook and obviously did a really good job, considering the fact that major Facebook’s features such as Like Button and Facebook Chat were created during hackathons, which were started by engineering manager Pedram Keyani by simply emailing his co-workers and inviting them to code all night and build some cool stuff. So, we can clearly see the combination of incredible company culture and internal communication resulted in innovative and valuable products for the company. Task management is a crucial part of internal communication because it allows companies to operate effortlessly and to make sure everything is completed on time.

There are lots of competing startups in the field of task management software, but Asana being a pioneer in the field has a significant market share and a growing customer base. It is used by major companies like UBER, Salesforce and Harvard University.

First of all, the application is a good choice for small startups, since it is extremely easy to set up and get going right outside the box. Huge corporations may develop their own systems, but small businesses don’t have resources and time to do that, Asana comes really handy in this situation.

The functionality is quite standard and straight-forward, you can form teams, assign tasks and monitor completion. Another Asana’s advantage is its mobile application, since it can be useful to separate your task management software from the actual working environment, so you can check incoming tasks or comments without being distracted from doing your job on a laptop.
In my opinion, Asana is most suitable for technology startups or web-development companies. However, there are lots of advanced features for large enterprises, so Asana can be effectively utilized by huge organizations as well. Any company may use it to increase productivity of its teams and to solve problems they encounter. The software is quite good and doesn’t have any significant flaws or bugs. So, I consider it to be one of the best offerings currently available on the market. 

If you tried Asana or any other similar software let me know in the comments section, share your experience!