Being fired from Nokia isn’t actually that bad

As Samsung and Apple continue to stamp out every remnant of competition left in the marketplace, some of the biggest names in wireless technology have been forced to let go of considerable portions of their staff. Nokia is perhaps the most prominent of all the smartphone manufacturers that couldn’t keep up, shrinking from 24,000 employees in its home country of Finland to just 10,600 by the end of last year.

During the years of Nokia’s decline, culminating in the sale of its mobile phone division to Microsoft in September, thousands of workers were made redundant. But the ex-Nokians have now created hundreds of new companies – thanks partly to a very Finnish level of support from the employer to its departing staff. Like many university graduates in Finland, Kimmo Koivisto only wanted to work for Nokia – the country’s biggest and most successful company. He fondly recalls the four years he spent working in its research strategy team in Helsinki. “Working for Nokia was my dream job. It was good fun, having the geek inside me enjoying all the geeky stuff that was happening,” he says.