On this particular afternoon at Kelloseppakoulu, or the Finnish School of Watchmaking, Roope Seppala was filing a small metal rod, part of an instrument he was making to build a watch and — if all goes to plan — a career making tourbillons and minute repeaters in Switzerland.
“That’s the dream,” said Mr. Seppala, 29, a first-year student at the school, which operates in Espoo, a city of about 300,000 residents near the Finnish capital, Helsinki, that is known as a center for high-tech businesses.
Making tools by hand is one of the longstanding requirements at the school, where students in the three-year watchmaking degree program “don’t go near a watch,” according to its rector, Hanna Harilainen, until they have made the instruments used to produce one.
Even students in the school’s three-year micromechanics degree program who intend to go into fields like space and medicine are required to build tools and learn watchmaking basics before they can move on to the complex technology needed for their careers.
And now students from around the globe will be held to the same standard, as the school prepares to offer a new watchmaking degree program in English aimed at international students.
It is “the secret sauce in our training,” said Ms. Harilainen, who joined the school in 2022 with a background in education and business. “We really make sure students, before even touching any clocks or wristwatches, really have a way with their hand-eye coordination; that they really know what they are doing.”
Once students begin to work on timepieces, they start with clocks and pocket watches, only progressing to wristwatches in their final year of study. Their last task is to make a watch by hand, using special finishing techniques such as guilloché, or engraving, and anglage, or beveling, that are known as hallmarks of high-end watchmaking.
After graduating in 2023, Rene Valta and Roope Kortela started their watch brand, Kortela Valta, in Porvoo, Finland. (Mr. Valta, 27, also teaches mathematics and first-year watch and clock theory at the school.)
Both men said that among the most important things they learned at the school were hand-to-eye coordination skills as well as the ability to read and understand how light reflects on different surfaces and behaves in different settings.
“It would be impossible to work the way we do,” said Mr. Kortela, 40, “building the timepieces we do, and hand finishing the components, without having honed these skills to the level they are now.”
Expansion Plans
Much of the school’s curriculum, offered tuition-free to Finnish citizens through the state-funded vocational education system, has been in place since the school’s founding in 1944 in the city of Lahti, about 65 miles north of Helsinki.
In 1959 the school moved to Espoo, to be closer to a technical college now known as Aalto University. And in 2007 it moved into its current quarters, a three-level former library of coffee-colored brick, surrounded by park land.
The curriculum initially was inspired by that at the horology school (now known as Glashütte Original Uhrmacherschule Alfred Helwig) in Glashütte, Germany, a mountain town long considered the seat of high-end German watchmaking. And for years, according to Markku Huhtula, a professor of wall, wooden and table clocks at the Finnish school, it maintained a close connection with the town, with about 10 graduates working at the famed Glashütte brand A. Lange & Söhne over the years.
The Finnish school has long been credited with elevating the Nordic country’s reputation within the watchmaking industry by producing alumni such as Kari Voutilainen, the celebrated independent watchmaker, now living and working in Switzerland, who attended the school in the 1980s.
Every year the school receives applications from approximately 200 Finnish residents, many of whom are 30 or older and have already had careers in other fields but now dream of becoming watchmakers, Ms. Harilainen said. They all are interviewed and given a series of psychological tests and assessments measuring cognitive skills and manual dexterity before 15 are chosen for each of the two degree programs.
But when the government’s recent funding cuts threatened the school’s continued existence, it decided to create a new English-language watchmaking course aimed at international students, scheduled to begin this fall.
Every other year the school plans to accept 10 students, each of which will pay a total tuition of 50,000 euros ($52,090) for two years of instruction on watchmaking essentials as well as the business and marketing skills needed to build a brand.
The certificate program, Ms. Harilainen said, is to “help with our financial situation, but also to do what our foundation’s purpose is: to advance the craftsmanship of watchmakers and the trade itself.” (She was referring to the Finnish Foundation for the Advancement of Watchmaking Skills, which oversees the school.)
The 13-member faculty, she said, was excited to welcome foreign students to the school, whose workshops and classrooms now occupy 1,800 square meters (19,375 square feet) within the 2,600-square-meter three-level building. To accommodate the program, there are plans to expand into an area of the building that the city now uses for storage, Ms. Harilainen said.
“We have a lot to offer and a strong reputation internationally,” she said, “and we want to encourage aspiring watchmakers to become the next Voutilainens and Sarpanevas.” (Stepan Sarpaneva, another noted graduate, worked at well-known brands such as Piaget, Parmigiani Fleurier and Vianney Halter before starting his own workshop in Helsinki in 2003.)
Ms. Harilainen said that the school was recruiting the new students through social media and its website, and had been receiving email enquiries from prospective students in the United States, Asia and Europe.
The program has support from the school’s prestigious alumni. “To survive and develop, the school has had to align with today’s needs,” Mr. Voutilainen wrote in an email, “so this is a perfect match.”
After Graduation
Ms. Harilainen said she was aware that the industry has been struggling with a global shortage of watchmakers, and in the recent past the school had considered collaborations with large manufacturers, who were eager to hire students after graduation.
But Ms. Harilainen’s recent trips to Switzerland had persuaded her to keep the curriculum — and new program — focused on small-scale independent watchmaking.
“The order quantities have gone drastically down,” she said, referring to a 2.8 percent decline in 2024 Swiss exports reported by the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, “and they are not hiring as eagerly any longer.”
In the past, most of the school’s watchmaking graduates have found jobs in Finland: working in watch repair or maintenance; starting their own brands; or, occasionally, establishing careers in fields such as medicine or physics. About a third end up working in the watch industry abroad, Ms. Harilainen said.
But the graduates who go abroad typically don’t join major commercial Swiss watch manufacturers, said Torsti Laine, an alumnus who founded his own brand in Switzerland and is well known in high-end watchmaking, explaining that those businesses tend to prefer French-speaking hires from established Swiss schools.
“In Swiss schools,” he said, “everything is organized for big enterprises. They have all the best equipment and a lot of equipment.”
But, he noted, the industry does recognize that the Finnish school’s focus on manual dexterity and problem-solving produces graduates with classic watchmaking skills, such as Mr. Voutilainen.
Mr. Voutilainen has been a great example “that it can be done,” Mr. Laine said. He “gives the impression that it’s not impossible to do your own work.”
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