Practical training: service advisor, L&T Ympäristöpalvelut Oy

I spent the last four months of my life working as a service advisor in a company know as Lassila&Tikanoja. To be more specific, I worked for one of its subsidiaries; L&T Ympäristöpalvelut Oy. The company is the market leader of Finland in the field of waste disposal. It also has operations in Sweden. In this post, I will discuss about the organization I worked for, and I will go through, how one of my normal workdays looked like.

Located in Lutakonaukio, Jyväskylä, on the second floor of the office building, L&T has modern and cozy facilities for working. Basically, the office is separated into two different parts. The other part is where one can find service advisors working for private customer service and for business customer service (for which I worked for). The other part of the office has people working for customer service of facility maintenance and for key customers.

About the staff, in addition to service advisors, there is two so-called group leaders, which have some more responsibilities than service advisors. Also, there are three team leaders, who are managers of service advisors. There is also working service specialists and salespeople, but there is not much about their responsibilities I could tell you. The whole office is led by the head of unit.

As a service advisor, you can work either remotely or in the office. Also, since the company’s customer service is open from 07:00 until 17:00, there are three different shifts. Either 07:00-15:00, 08:00-16:00 or 09:00-17:00. Every service advisor works always a week at a time one of those shifts, which was nice, since your working hours are not the same every week.

Let me go through a usual workday for me working from 08:00 to 16:00. I wake up at 07:00, do my morning chores and cycle to the office. I get a cup of coffee and around 08:00 I’ll start working on either only electrical tasks or taking calls from customers, depending how our team leaders have planned the day. Around 10:00, I will get a second cup of coffee and have my coffee break. By 12:00, I will have my lunch break and go to Fiilu, restaurant which is next to the office (student lunch served every day). After lunchbreak, I still have one coffee break left and then I would leave the office around 16:00. During the day, the most common work task is sending emptying orders to the company’s production unit. There are so many different work tasks, that writing about all of them would take too much time. Let’s just say that every workday is somewhat different, which is nice.

Overall, I can recommend L&T Ympäristöpalvelut as a place for accomplishing practical training. Even though the job has somewhat sales into it, you basically don’t need to sell anything. Customers always reach out to you first, and you have a fixed monthly salary, which doesn’t vary whether you are able to create more contracts or not (the salary is also very good for an undergraduate student!). Also, whether you are a “lonely wolf” or a “social butterfly”, the jobs will fit you both ways. The familiarization for the job took five weeks, which at first felt like too long, but after it, you understand why it takes that long. You must be able to understand and operate so many different systems, sometimes simultaneously. Last but not least, the working environment was supportive, transparent and relaxed.

Author: Rudolf Jurvanen. Third year IB-student