Police as career enabler
IT Architect Juha Impiö
National Police Board, Information Technology Centre of the Police
Technology competence management, Master of Applied Sciences
Towards the end of the 2000s, I was completing my degree in software engineering and was mulling over various career choices across the IT scene. I mapped my opportunities both in the private and the public sector. With some career choices, I would be able to stay in my native Rovaniemi while others would have brought me to the Helsinki metropolitan area.
In the end, my first job was in a Rovaniemi-based private IT company where I spent six years looking around and seeing, experiencing and learning. Towards the end of this career path, I completed my Master’s in Applied Sciences in technology competence management. With my new degree in my pocket, it was time for me to take a step further, and in 2013 I started to work for the Ministry of Interior’s ICT agency HALTIK and had the Police as my dedicated client. Frankly, the big career change gave a lot of food for thought and I was not at all sure whether I had made the correct choice and whether public administration really could offer a path for an IT expert to develop.
During the first few years, I worked in tasks related to the Police permit administration. I was an systems expert and project manager in the field of passports and ID cards. The one thing I particularly remember from those years was the induction phase: they genuinely wanted me to succeed as a new man in my tasks. Indeed, I have been an inductor myself later in my career and have been able to utilise the lessons and means provided to me back then.
Great lookout over Police IT systems
After the permit administration, I moved on to IT architecture. At that point, I also moved from HALTIK to the Police Board. At first, the architecture tasks were related to individual IT systems but over the years, with increased experience, my responsibilities grew to cover the entire Police IT system field. I also gained new responsibilities in the areas of cyber security and preparedness. I also became responsible for the framework competitive bidding programmes related to the Police IT expert services as well as the challenging contractual negotiations comprising the area of IT.
The latest new turn in my path of development was in 2021 when my architecture tasks were complemented with the possibility to develop, as the main responsible actor, a fully new Police internal IT service which, in fact, the Police never earlier had in this form. Currently, I work as the Head of Group in the group developing the service. My new task is one step in the continuum of my jobs in the Police IT field: whenever I have felt a need to develop and assume new responsibilities, the Police has been able to offer them to me.
If I were told, when still a student of software technology in early 2000s that this would be my career development with the Police, I would not have believed that this would be my career path. During the years as a student, working with the Police was not my first idea of work, since I never could imagine it was an option. Now I can say that working with the Police has enabled me to proceed in my career!
