Sweco tailors a post-graduate training programme in wood construction together with Novia University

The postgraduate training programme in heavy and exceptionally heavy timber construction design, jointly tailored by Novia University of Applied Sciences and Sweco, started in 2021. The Finnish- and partly English-language training programme attracted enthusiastic participants from Finland and Sweden. The programme is supported by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.

The 30-credit programme is aimed at professionals with a degree in engineering, building architecture or construction management who have already gained previous work experience in the construction sector. The training programme covers topics such as building fire design, acoustics, climate impact, life cycle and carbon footprint calculations.

The training, together with the previously obtained university degree and the accumulated work experience, provides qualifications for heavy and exceptionally heavy design tasks in the field of timber structures according to the criteria of the Finnish Ministry of the Environment and the FISE criteria for personal qualifications in the field of building, plumbing and real estate. The programme is tailored to the workplace in collaboration with Sweco and Ramboll. The design houses have contributed to the design of the content of the training programme and provide students with practical exercises in real client projects.

Sweco has previously designed, for example, the headquarters of gaming company Supercell in Jätkäsaari’s Wood City district, which is the largest wooden office building in Finland in terms of the amount of wood used. The wood used in the project, mainly Savoia spruce, is estimated by Stora Enso to store carbon dioxide equivalent to the annual emissions of 600 cars.

The site is a concrete example of a great ground-breaking project, the design of which is the best area for future graduates to work on, concludes Leppänen.