The employment situation in Finland is hard to ignore. Similar patterns are reflected more broadly in labour market and skills research which consistently points to rapid change and growing pressure to update skills throughout working life (World Economic Forum 2025). Every day we can see people lamenting this situation regardless of their age, background, or employment status. Questions arise such as:
- How do I build skills as work keeps changing?
- How do I build experience without changing jobs?
- How do I prove what I can do, not just what my CV says?
- How can I build a portfolio of real cases?
If any of that sounds familiar, you can look beyond traditional courses and career pathways and look to participating in innovation challenges to expand your network or build resilient skills. This is not going to get you a job on its own, but it will add to your skillset and give you a diversity of experiences that others may not have.
As a warning (or an enticement), innovation challenges are intense, they’re a little chaotic (but in a good way), and in the end, they can be deeply energising. What tends to be overlooked is this: innovation challenges are powerful environments for building the skills employers, organisations, and communities actually need. They are also about building on what you already have and making it visible, transferable, and stronger.
Innovation challenges are not just training
An innovation challenge requires you to re-evaluate of what you think is possible. You’re given a theme or problem, a tight timeframe, and a team of people you probably wouldn’t have chosen yourself. There is guidance but no instruction manual. No one will tell you the ‘right’ answer, nor solve the problem for you.
Instead, with light facilitation and coaching, you move through a fast-paced, human-centred process. You talk to people and test your assumptions. You realise some of those assumptions are wrong. You try again. You build something to show others and learn from feedback. Then you refine and move forward. This kind of learning-by-doing aligns closely with what learning research has long shown about how adults build durable skills (Cloke 2023).
That feeling of productive uncertainty, not knowing the answer but making decisions anyway, is exactly what many people struggle with in modern working life. Innovation challenges give you a safe but real environment to practise these skills.
Five skills you can build in a single challenge
You might walk away with new connections, ideas, prototypes, and improved presentation skills. But the real value lies in the invisible skill-building that happens along the way.
Here are five capabilities that consistently develop during innovation challenges and how they help beyond the event itself:
Empathy that goes beyond theory
Many organisations say they’re user-centred or customer-focused, but few people have truly practised this, and many don’t really understand what this means. In an innovation challenge, empathy isn’t a buzzword; it’s a requirement.
You need to understand why a problem exists before jumping to solutions, in any situation. This requires you to listen more and to ask better questions. Often, you learn quickly that your first idea is rarely the best one. This ability to design with people rather than for them is valuable across healthcare, education, public services, business, and technology.
Collaboration across disciplines and personalities
Innovation challenges don’t let you work only with people who think like you. Teams are often curated to be deliberately diverse in background, experience, and fields. You continue to practise skills like how to contribute without dominating, how to navigate disagreement, and how to keep momentum when things feel messy. The latter is one of the most transferable skills in modern work.
Employers care deeply about this, particularly when you can talk about what you learned about working with others, not just what you produced. This focus on collaboration, adaptability, and communication is reflected in different employer reports across sectors (World Economic Forum 2025; Hosseinioun et al. 2025).
Creativity for the non-creatives
Many people arrive convinced they’re ‘not creative’. Almost all of them prove themselves wrong. Creativity in these challenges isn’t about art or aesthetics. It’s about idea generation, reframing problems, and improving imperfect concepts. Structured methods make creativity accessible, repeatable, and practical.
That confidence carries forward into meetings, workshops, and decision-making long after the challenge ends.
Problem-solving under real constraints
Time and resources are limited, and information is incomplete. This isn’t a flaw; it’s the way it is designed. These constraints are there for practising prioritising, letting go of ideas that aren’t working, and moving forward without certainty. That’s exactly what modern work looks like in startups, large organisations, and public institutions alike.
Perfection isn’t the goal; progress is far more important.
Storytelling that explains your thinking
At the end of an innovation challenge, you don’t just show what you made. You explain why you made it and how you got there.
You tell stories based on evidence, user insights, and learning along the way. This ability to articulate your thinking and methods turns a short experience into something you can use in portfolios, interviews, performance reviews, and proposals. It shows employers and collaborators how you think, not just what you know.
You don’t need to be an innovator to join
One of the biggest misconceptions about innovation challenges is that they’re only for people with design, business, or tech skills. They aren’t. What matters is curiosity, willingness to try, and openness to working with others. Innovation challenges are about participation, not expertise. Everyone on the team has a skillset that they bring to the table, it is about getting the most out of as many of those as possible.
Participating in events like this sends a strong signal: you’re someone who steps into ambiguity, adapts quickly, and contributes value without needing perfect conditions. You are a person who is persistent, resilient, and able to sit in ambiguity.
Less an event, more of a mindset shift
People often describe innovation challenges as tiring but inspiring. What lingers isn’t just what the concepts created, it’s how you start to see problems, work, and yourself differently. You become more comfortable starting before you feel ready. You trust the process a little more and you realise that learning doesn’t only have to happen in formal settings. Research into modern working life increasingly points to adaptability and comfort with ambiguity as important long-term capabilities (Hosseinioun et al. 2025).
The skills of curiosity, adaptability, and collaboration are what help people grow in unpredictable careers. Sometimes the most meaningful skill-building experiences don’t look like career planning at all. Sometimes they look like saying yes to a challenge that changes how you approach your work and your future.
Look out for innovation challenges in your area that are open to anyone. You do not need special subject-related skills before you start, just a willingness to learn and work with others. Taking part can also be a great way to connect big issues with local problems and solutions!
References
Cloke H. 2023. John Dewey’s Learning Theory: How We Learn Through Experience. Growth Engineering Blog. Published 28 September 2023. Accessed 22 January 2026. https://www.growthengineering.co.uk/john-dewey/
Hosseinioun, M., Neffke, F, Youn, H., & Zhang, L. 2025. Soft Skills Matter Now More Than Ever, According to New Research. Harvard Business Review. Published 26 August 2025. Accessed 26 January 2026. https://hbr.org/2025/08/soft-skills-matter-now-more-than-ever-according-to-new-research
World Economic Forum. 2025. Insight Report: Future of Jobs Report 2025. Published 7 January 2025. Accessed 24 January 2026. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full/3-skills-outlook/
Author
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Pamela Spokes
Specialist, TurbiiniPamela Spokes BA, MA, MBA, AmO. Educator in Service Design and Entrepreneurship with the Turbiini Pre-Incubator Programme in English.
About the author