Valmet Automotive is a multidisciplinary industrial company founded in Finland in 1968. The company operates as a contract manufacturing partner for the automotive, defence, and other high-technology industries. Industry changes are constant, and the daily work of project professionals revolves around technical requirements, tight schedules, and complex delivery structures.
Supporting the organization through change is important, and the company has invested significantly in this area in recent years. Petri Nieminen, Lead Project Engineer responsible for procuring the training, describes the starting point:
“In a highly technical expert organization, attention naturally focuses on hard skills and technical expertise. The people perspective is not forgotten, but it receives less attention than it should, and this is reflected in how changes are implemented.”
Tailored Change Management Training for the Practical Challenges of Project Professionals
Valmet Automotive selected Taskmill as its partner for the change management training program for project professionals delivered in spring 2026. A key reason was that all our trainers actively work with clients and are therefore able to translate learning into highly practical insights through their own experience.
Taskmill’s Organisational Change Management (OCM) training was designed from the outset to match Valmet Automotive’s operating environment, and the unique challenges participants face in their work. The goal was to create a practical training program for change agents that is closely connected to participants’ everyday work and whose lessons can be applied directly in practice. The training also took different roles and learning styles into account and emphasized interaction throughout the day.
Before the training day, a planning workshop was held to select and refine scenarios that reflected situations participants could encounter in their own daily work.
The day’s content was built around participants’ own experiences. These experiences served as a foundation for exploring new perspectives on how change affects people, what happens psychologically during change, and how individuals can strengthen their own sense of agency even in situations beyond their control.
“Change was examined from three perspectives: the individual, the team, and the organization. The facilitation approach encouraged everyone to first form their own view independently, then discuss it in small groups before bringing it into a shared discussion. These joint reflection sessions became a significant part of the learning process,” says Johanna Kettunen, Trainer and Organisational Coach.
The most significant exercise of the day was a scenario-based workshop in which small groups applied the methods and tools they had learned. The groups diagnosed a change situation, assessed key risks, and developed an approach for implementing the change and supporting communication.
The day concluded with a Change Myth Busters quiz, a fast-paced team competition that playfully tested participants’ understanding of the concepts covered during the training.
Putting Change Management into Practice
Participants awarded the training an impressive overall rating of 4.55 out of 5. The most significant outcome was the addition of a people-centred perspective to participants’ toolkits through the scenario exercise. Participants who had previously worked mainly with technology-driven change felt they approached the exercise from a completely different perspective in the afternoon than they would have before the training. Anchoring the learning experience in personal experience was considered highly effective, and a genuine people perspective on change emerged during the day.
One project manager leading a change initiative commented afterwards that they had never fully realized how strongly people’s emotions are connected to the success of change. This insight concretely changed their perspective on project work.
“A full-day training program delivered in this way achieves much more than simply reviewing theories at a high level. Especially when the trainer can bring such strong practical expertise into the room and facilitate open discussions around topics that can be challenging in Finnish working culture, such as emotions,” says Petri Nieminen, Lead Project Engineer, Valmet Automotive.