Game giant Wargaming acquires cultural knowledge from TUAS
Wargaming Public Co Ltd, an important company in the game industry, operates worldwide from its offices and development centres located for instance in Minsk, Belarus. Now, TUAS has entered the game world as a cultural trainer.
According to a just-signed agreement, TUAS will provide online cultural training for Wargaming in Minsk. The objective of the training is to introduce participants to the American, European and Asian way to act in different working-life situations.
Yury Shilyaev, Aleksandr Zezulin, Sofia Chebanova and Olya Tikhonchuk from Wargaming visited the Turku Game Lab opening event and the gathering of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) organised in Turku last October.
The expertise in the game industry and the innovative training in the game field we have here in Turku made a great impact on the visitors. During the visit, Shilyaev also told about the training needs of Wargaming, and Marianne Renvall, the head of corporate language education of TUAS Language Centre, took up the challenge.
“Already for years, here at TUAS Language Centre we have provided companies with training in cultural knowledge. However, this is a totally new kind of challenge for us because this client is a huge, international company operating, for instance, in Belarus. Cultural competence is a prerequisite for sales success and for the whole business industry, and its importance has also been acknowledged in Belarus,” Renvall points out and continues: “As the organiser of the training our strengths include expertise, reliability and accuracy.” Renvall believes that this opening is extremely important for TUAS’ education export.
Recognising cultural differences in order to interact more effectively
“Recognising cultural differences and characteristics is an important element, especially, in sales, marketing and customer service. When one masters communication methods of different cultures, cooperation works smoothly and money is saved,” Renvall reflects. Renvall is excited about the theme and underlines that cultural training is not only needed abroad, but also here in Finland.
Marjo Joshi, an experienced cultural trainer at TUAS, will be training Wargaming. This cultural training, conducted in English, will be implemented during spring 2014.
The training takes place interactively online and is comprised of webinars. Until the end of May 2014, the Wargaming staff participating in the training from Minsk have the change to familiarise themselves with Asian, American and European cultures and to learn how representatives of these cultures act in different working-life situations.
The aim is also to expand cooperation with Wargaming in the field of game development.
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