Sharpen

08/09/2021

Today, Kajaani UAS (KAMK) is honored to have the SHARPEN partners meeting and addressing the first-year master's degree students on key HRM topics. Although the SHARPEN project has ended two years ago, the network, collaboration, and support for each other continue to flourish and deepen strategically. My heartfelt thanks to the partner presenters. You have made a memorable start for the HRM course and set the tone to reiterate the importance of adopting sustainable people management strategies and practices in every organization. Regardless of size, from big to microsize, every manager must keep pace with the rapidly changing environment in order to adapt our people management competencies and approaches to create a better and balance place for future work. Danke! Ačiū! Thank you! Kiitos!

21/12/2019

Have a relaxing festive and holiday season!

26/11/2019

Two our wonderful SHARPEN students from the Czech team won a "Young Scientist" award that is awarded each year to univeristy students in the Euroregion Nisa. Congratulations!

21/09/2019

Our SHARPEN publications were introduced as a part of the Knowledge Transfer Week in Liberec to more than 100 participants from academia and business from Czech Republic as well as from Finland, Norway, Russia, etc. So far, we received very positive feedback to our outputs and we are happy that we could share it with so many interested people.

11/09/2019

SHARPEN OUTPUTS FINALLY READY!

Are you interested in HRM? Do you work in or own an SME? Do you teach HR or SME management? Or would you simply like to know something more about how to manage people in SMEs? We are proud to announce that the SHARPEN project outputs have been finalised and are now publicly available.

https://sharpen.ef.tul.cz/index.php?content=outputs

Please visit Outputs and see our brand new LEARNING MODULE that will give you the edge in teaching HRM for SMEs. Download our GOOD PRACTICE GUIDE TO MANAGING HUMAN RESOURCES IN REGIONAL SMEs to read practical insights or have a look at our research publication PEOPLE MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES FOR SMES IN FIVE EUROPEAN REGIONS. The Good practice guide and the research publication are both available in 5 European languages (English, Czech, Finnish, Lithuanian and German).

31/08/2019

3 years. 36 months. The duration of four full-term babies!

31.8.2019 marks the (official) last day of the 3-year SHARPEN project which has brought together five regions from five European countries, a large team of HR specialists, other expertise, regional organisations, partner SMEs and 90+ students made of over 20 nationalities. It is a truly multi-national, multi-cultural, cross-disciplinary project of its kind!

The journey has been a great learning opportunity for every member of the SHARPEN family; we went through ups and downs, we learned and developed, we produced results, we shared experiences, we supported each other through hard water, and finally we are now enjoying the fruits of success together! In the end, we believe every participant is proud to be part of the SHARPEN team and what we have accomplished together!

Here is a short video clip to bring back good memories of the productive, fruitful and exciting path we had walked through together.

Click: https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZnbBkkZNatVccrdCnVxOHgOzG5vTYFlSwsV

In addition, we would also recommend that you check out the SHARPEN website for the outputs produced in joint efforts of the SHARPEN family!

Click: https://sharpen.ef.tul.cz/

We sincerely hope the materials, contents, knowledge, experiences generated will help SMEs in the partner regions and beyond to appreciate the importance of HRM in their enterprise, and we recommend that they apply some of the tools created to practice.

Despite the project is ending, the SHARPEN team believes we have created a legacy that will sustain and continue from now on to reinforce the message about the importance of HRM in SMEs and what SMEs can do to deal with people management issues more effectively.

So, please help us to share and spread the gospel of HRM for SMEs :)

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27/06/2019

Final SHARPEN meeting at the University of Applied Sciences Zwickau

Yesterday 26th June the German team held their last SHARPEN workshop meeting at a special location. We travelled to the nearby city of Chemnitz to have a stimulating and innovative last session at the coworking hub Business Village Chemnitz. In addition to a round of feedback we held a creative brainwriting session, supported by Lena from last year's student team and some delicious snacks. Finally, Prof. Walter, the module teacher, and Prof. Schumann, one of the German project leaders, presented the SHARPEN certificates to the student team.

24/06/2019

The SHARPEN round table hosted by Dr Julie Davies and Dr Muhibul Haq on 20 June 2019 at Huddersfield Business School on managing people in ethnic minority owned regional micro businesses included excellent presentations from Eastern Catering and Engineering, Deluxe Beds, LTR10 Creative and Radio Sangam. We discussed recruitment and retention, health and safety, cultural sensitivity, knowledge management and talent and succession management as well as internationalisation. We also talked about the value of social media conversations and awareness raising rather than direct selling, community radio advertising, and SME-university synergies for student projects and government bids such as knowledge transfer partnerships.

12/06/2019

Final student meeting!

today, 12th June, we met for the last time as a group with our Czech SHARPEN student team. We talked about the progress of the case studies and then the leader of the SHARPEN project, Ms. Marsikova, gave the students certificates proving that they completed the project. After that, we treated ourselves to some coffee and cakes to mark the nearing of the end of the project.

12/06/2019

The last transnational meeting!

On Thursday and Friday, the SHARPEN project team met for the last time "face to face". We discussed what needs to be done and the last details of how will the project end. It was a day filled with hard work but we managed to decide on all the important issues and we believe that the project will end as a complete success.

11/06/2019

Today the German SHARPEN student team presented their case studies at the University of Applied Sciences Zwickau. We had two very interesting presentations and it was a positive ending for a succesful semester of cooperation with our five partner universities as well as the case study companies.