[Alumni Interview] Alina Sidbrant — Connecting ESTIEM and Arekibo

As a result of our collaboration with Arekibo, we have here an interview with our dear alumni member, Alina Sidbrant.

Alina is an Alumna from LG Heaven (LG Saint-Petersburg). She was active in the network from 2012 to 2016. Started as the Head of HR in the LG board, then became ESTIEM Training Committee leader in 2014/2015 and the very first ESTIEM Ambassador in 2015/2016. Through her ESTIEM years, she has also been part of LG Gothenburg and took an active role in the reactivation of LG Tallinn.

Even with a major in International Law, from St Petersburg State University of Engineering and Economics, she was always an ESTIEMer at heart who always felt interested in problem-solving and management. Right now, she is living in Dublin, Ireland, and working within the digital innovation field.

We have asked Alina about her journey in ESTIEM, motivation to do the White Paper, future collaborations, and many other things.

If this got you curious, check out the interview on the link down below!

1. Looking back at your journey as an ESTIEMer, what is the best memory you have from your time in the network?

That is a difficult question because I have so many great memories from my time in ESTIEM, so I decided to cover a good few briefly. Just some of the things that came to my mind are:

• My first ESTIEM event — and the first-ever Training Committee meeting in Warsaw, where I had no idea what was going on but suddenly was discussing the committee budget among the other things.
• My own Training Committee Coordination meeting in Gdansk. The event that combined 2 in 1 — regular coordination meeting and Trainers practice camp, so we enjoyed trainings from salsa dancing to beekeeping and time management.
• Council Meeting Istanbul — a 5-star event with a 1M euro budget and a fantastic GA hall. Also, interrupting the presentation of TIMES leader with “My little pony” song.
• New Years Activity week in Saint-Petersburg, where we had a bathtub full of Russian salad.
• Council meeting Vienna — another beautiful GA hall, and 12 special delegates (“LG Externals”), representing 12 ESTIEM partner organisations and my VP crying.
• Our Training Committee chats, when first in the network we had a problem of Skype being unable to host so many participants.
• Council Meeting Baltics, which we organised in Riga together with 6 Baltics Local Groups.
• Stealing the CM Chairperson’s gavel 5 times.

1. What did you learn in ESTIEM that helped you during your professional life?

Three most important skills that I developed in ESTIEM are: leadership, communication, and solution-orientation. Leading the community of 300 trainers and training enthusiasts, I learned that it is all about the people. This means that together with leading by example doing the actual work, a good leader is inspiring and motivating for the team. She cares about each member of the team and tries to create a safe and supportive environment, where all their initiatives are supported and mistakes are allowed.

Another important skill that I apply at my job every day is communication. When I coordinated the relationships with 80+ partner organisations, I noticed that some of these were working out really well, while others showed no progress at all. The difference between those was in open, transparent and timely communication. Open means covering any type of issue without abandoning the sensitive topics. Transparent is honest. And timely means frequent communication, that respects deadlines and on-demand follow up.

The third quality that I gained working in ESTIEM is solution-orientation. As ESTIEM is a playground, ESTIEMers are encouraged to always try to find creative solutions to the problems, so at some point, I stopped seeing problems as negative, but more as fun challenges that I need to overcome. For example, when on the first day of the Council Meeting Riga the hostel that was supposed to fit 200 CM participants had burned down, with no other accommodation facilities available in town, we found an empty building and bought 200 IKEA beds to host the delegates. We divided our team, one was building the beds on the spot as the participants were arriving, while the other team was distracting them at the local bar. It worked out well, so since then I try to bring this attitude to every challenge I face at work.

1. What was the motivation to approach ESTIEM to do the white paper?

I now work at Arekibo — Irish digital platform agency, where we design and build digital platforms to underpin global businesses. We work with Ireland’s largest companies, such as airports, banks, consultancy and law firms, hospitals, universities and governmental institutions, helping them create their digital presence. Digital is our passion, and it is constantly changing, so we are always trying to keep us and our clients up to date with the latest digital innovations, research work, such as survey and white papers are all parts of that ambition.

Web security, web privacy, cookies usage, personalisation of the web — all are the trending topics on the Global Digital agenda at the moment. These issues have also become the focus on the European Digital arena. Furthermore, in Ireland the digital experience managers were encouraged to pay special attention to cookie management, as Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has published the compliance regulation, coming into force 05.10.2020. In order to help our clients plan their digital strategy, we decided to do our own research around these topics and we needed a trusted partner to help us with data collection. Because of my ESTIEM background, the idea of partnering with the organisation came into my head naturally, so in August this year we joined forces and sampled 180 millennials to find out their views and opinions on security, privacy, tracking, personalisation and trust on the web.

1. Arekibo is a quite big agency. How would you describe a regular day at the office?

I work at Arekibo as a Marketing Innovation Analyst. A regular day at Arekibo for me is a combination of individual and team-based work. On average I have 3 to 4 meetings a day. During these calls I can be interviewing our clients for the blog article, catching up on the joint marketing initiatives with one of our technology partners, discussing our marketing strategy and activities together with my colleague Jennifer, or solving some strategic issues with the CEO and the team. The rest of the time is used to follow-up on these calls, work on the action points to move things forward, or designing some of the creative assets for our blog or social media.

Brand awareness and lead generation campaigns are another big part of our marketing work. We try to hold about 4 campaigns per quarter, so planning, facilitating and evaluating these campaigns take up a lot of my time. Occasionally, I get to do some client work too. Recently I have been working on auditing the digital strategy for a large corporate.

1. Can we expect to see more projects like this between ESTIEM & Arekibo? Do you see this type of collaboration as a big part of the future of Education in ESTIEM?

Definitely, yes. I believe such collaborations between the student organisations and the corporates are beneficial for both. It is a win-win because the students get to work with the industry and through the process can learn some about the professional business world, while companies can get fresh and unbiased opinions and ideas from students. Our whole team at Arekibo is delighted with the joint white paper we published in September together with ESTIEM. We look forward to new exciting projects in the future!

Thank you Alina for these wise words! We hope ESTIEMers will find them useful and get inspired as much as we did in this collaboration.