You may study ISS in many ways:
We educate professionals who have knowledge both in business and in IT. Such hybrids are highly wanted by companies and public sector organizations. The employment rate of our students is extremely high, and they get good positions as managers and experts or start their own business.
ISS is an exciting and safe choice for a major. Our students are excellent candidates when a company needs a person to lead IT initiatives for business process development or to create business innovations based on new technology. Hybrids may be better than “nerds” in implementing IT and managing the organizational change that implementation usually entails. On the other hand, hybrids are IT literate enough to be able to see the business opportunities of fast developing technology. Thus, our students are performing outstandingly well as intermediaries between IT and business. What a thrilling mission!
Some students have analytical skills. Some are socially skillful. Our students are both when graduating from one of our programmes.
In many cases, students find their first “proper job” already while studying or right after graduation. Then, career development is up to you! Our education gives you good skills and exceptional opportunities to move on to working life. Often the first job relates to project management, IS implementation and change management, business requirement definition, or analytics.
Please browse to "Latest alumni survey" to find results from a survey that gives more insight into career options.
You may study Information Systems Science at Turku School of Economics both in bachelor level and master level. Our bachelor programme is in Finnish only, while all master level teaching is in English.
We have several master's degree programmes for candidates with different backgrounds, and with several international partner universities. The list of courses and the core content varies slightly from programme to programme.
More words about our teaching under "Curriculum" section.
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When you have a suitable bachelor's degree, you may apply for one of our master's degree programmes:
Please find more information on our international master programs IMMIT and GITM here.
After getting in to TSE for bachelor studies, you may choose ISS as your major subject already during your first year by selecting the “Digital business” (Digitaalinen liiketoiminta) option inside the "Marketing and value chain management" degree programme (Markkinoinnin ja arvoketjujen johtamisen kandidaatin tutkinto). For more information, contact Jonna Järveläinen.
After bachelor studies you can continue to our domestic master's degree programme without any specific application, or apply for our international master's degree programmes.
The core of our curriculum reflects quite well the model created by the Association of Information Systems (AIS), an international society of ISS researchers and teachers. The model gives guidelines to plan a study program. On the bachelor level, adequate skills and knowledge are created to make students ready to focus on those professional areas listed in the picture. All 9 areas are then included in our master level courses to some extent, some of them already on the bachelor level.
Studying ISS is interesting and practice oriented. We use a lot of cases and exercises. Our strong alumni network supports our teaching, providing visiting lectures and practical case studies in their organizations.
Our student organization TuKYDATA organizes events and useful excursions in Finnish companies. They also make a trip abroad once a year, e.g. Silicon Valley or China.
By studying in our programmes, with suitable minoring subjects, you may create a very strong professional profile that gives you excellent opportunities to succeed in working life. See the results of our latest alumni survey.
In bachelor level ISS is one of the majors in the program of "Marketing and value chain management" bachelor's degree programme (Markkinoinnin ja arvoketjujen johtamisen kandidaatin tutkinto). You will complete a fewmandatory courses for this programme, some courses mandatory for ISS majors, and some selective courses to fulfill the study point requirements. Please contact Jonna Järveläinen for more details.
On the bachelor level we educate students to understand the possibilities and various ways to deploy IT in business. We also make sure they’ll have adequate IT skills. We do not make them technical experts, but they need to have knowledge on IT principles, e.g. modeling and design of information systems, using IT in digital business, refining data for business purposes, and use of IT for decision support and business intelligence.
On the bachelor level, we offer the same courses both to ISS majoring students and other students. On the master level we go deeper into professional IT management topics.
We have several master's degree programmes for students with varying backgrounds. This means slightly different lists of obligatory courses for different groups. However, all our master level courses are suitable for all our students. All master level courses are taught in English. Because of the varying backgrounds of students the courses have an international and multicultural nature. This creates an exciting and fruitful atmosphere for discussions and group work.
Our master level courses are appointed mainly to ISS majoring students, but there are usually no restrictions for other students to participate as well. In many courses there are students majoring for example in marketing, accounting or computer science.
Read more about our international master programmes IMMIT and GITM, here.
For more information on international master programmes and application procedure, please contact Dr.Sc. Mrs. Eija Koskivaara.
ISS has been a very popular subject for doctoral studies since the 1990's. There has been more than 30 dissertations. Please contact professor Hannu Salmela for more information.
Information systems science is a very popular minor subject among TSE students. Minor students may select our bachelor level courses freely from our course list. ISS is a very good minor for any majoring subject in TSE, but especially for accounting and finance, supply chain management, and marketing.
For students from other faculties at UTU we offer enough courses to make ISS a minor. You should ask your majoring subject's responsible teacher whether ISS is accepted as a minor for you. For resource reasons some of our bachelor level courses are offered to TSE students only. Please contact Timo Leino for more details.
If you have ISS as a minor and are interested in international studies or career, please consider our international joint master's degree programmes.
For all first year TSE students we offer a mandatory course TJY, Tietotekniikan hyödyntäminen (Deployment of IT), which is taught in finnish. This course is available for TSE students only.
The course has two parts:
TuKYData is the Student Assocation for Information Systems Science (Digital Business) at Turku School of Economics. We act as a link between students and the Department of ISS. We have regular meetings with the Department personnel and the communication between students and the Department is truly two-way.
TuKYData is well-known for its excursions – both in Finland and abroad. In Finland we have visited various high-level IT-companies including Reaktor, BearingPoint, and Accenture. Our famous abroad-excursions have previously taken us to Shanghai, Ghana, Boston, New York, and Silicon Valley. There we have visited companies like Facebook, Smartly.io, Nokia, and F-Secure. In Autumn 2018 made had a trip to Los Angeles, California!
Alongside co-operation and excursions, we organize many types of events during a year, including training sessions for ISS courses, cottage trips and of course feedback sessions.
Since 1979, information systems science has been one of the majoring subjects at TSE. The amount of students choosing ISS as a major on bachelor level has varied, the highest number being 29, in 2016. In addition to that are the master's degree programme students having done their bachelor's degree outside TSE. Altogether the yearly number of master level students is nowadays close to 50.
This history has created an extensive alumni network, and the role of our alumni is remarkable. They give visiting lectures in our courses and we write cases for teaching together with them. They offer master's thesis projects and excursion opportunities. We try to keep close contacts with our alumni. Besides their supporting role in teaching we carry out surveys to find out current trends for IT professionals. You can find a summary of the last survey from 2017 below. According to this survey, covering Finnish alumni only, roughly one third is working in the Turku area, half of them in the Helsinki area, and the rest elsewhere in Finland or abroad. There are many titles and job contents: they are IT professionals or managers, experts or managers in other business functions, or entrepreneurs. Career prospects for new ISS masters seems to be bright.
Updating the list of alumni email addresses is challenging, because of constant career progress. As an alumna or alumnus, you are always welcome to send us your new contact data to Timo Leino. You are also, of course, welcome to join in our alumni groups in Facebook and LinkedIn.
Privacy notice for our alumni database (in Finnish).
You may open a short summary of results here.