Joakim Heinolainen

Joakim Heinolainen, Technical Consultant at Design Solutions at NAPA Finland, works mainly with naval architecture and stability-related topics and helps NAPA’s customers with them. NAPA’s customers deal with complex ship-building projects and usually look for support from Joakim and the team in that they’re proceeding in the correct manner with their designs using NAPA Design software. In addition to the core of the Technical Consultant role in customer service, Joakim’s work includes customer training on NAPA Design and customer demonstrations for sales purposes.

Joakim enjoys problem-solving. He shares with NAPA’s customers their common goal to complete their ship design projects, which makes his job rewarding. He says that he is motivated by the possibility to impact the content of his work as per his own interests and gives the Design manual renewal project as an example of that.

Joakim Heinolainen, Technical Consultant

Initially, Joakim came to work at NAPA as a summer intern on two separate occasions. That then led to him writing his master thesis here and eventually becoming a Naparian on a permanent basis. The role he has held over the years has evolved from various support tasks to solving customer cases. Joakim especially recalls warmly organizing NAPA User Meetings, saying that they’re his best memories of his NAPA years thus far.

On getting to know NAPA as a company and in products at a student association’s event, NAPA’s low organizational hierarchy and dynamic way of doing things seemed like attributes of a workplace that Joakim thought he’d enjoy. Some years later, and at the time of giving the career story interview, Joakim is, in fact, working remotely from Malaysia for a period of time. He sees the flexibility NAPA offers as a definite big plus for him.

Joakim enjoys working with his immediate team and other Naparians because of the positive attitude and commonly good spirit they share. “My colleagues are very knowledgeable, and there is a possibility for me to learn new things daily,” Joakim states. The self-managed organization of NAPA brings room for maneuvering my work towards the individual interests I have and creates space for making those choices. Because there are no bosses at NAPA, it appears to me that everyone is working from the standpoint of being internally motivated rather than externally directed, he continues.

NAPA is a great workplace for many kinds of people and personalities because it offers a broad spectrum of job roles. One can concentrate on the deep know-how of a niche topic, but there are also roles extending across a wider array of different topics, concludes Joakim.