From rejections to self-made paths, she helps people rebuild confidence and design careers that travel across borders!

Millions of people wake up each day, send out job applications, refresh their inboxes, and go to sleep with silence that feels heavier than effort – and the employment professionals walking alongside them feel that weight too. The world of work has shifted faster than any system could have fully anticipated. That gap isn’t born from lack of care – it’s an invitation to grow. But this same gap also creates a cycle that drains the job seeker’s confidence, stretches time, and leaves skilled individuals questioning their own worth.

Virpi Jalonen has lived close to this reality, though from a vantage point many job seekers rarely see. She has sat in rooms where hiring decisions are made, led teams through rapid growth, and worked across global tech environments where speed often leaves little room for second chances. Having worked across global talent acquisition, HR, and executive leadership environments, she saw firsthand how capable people were sometimes missing opportunities simply because the tools and methods around them hadn’t yet caught up with a rapidly changing world of work.

That insight formed her next chapter. As an ICF Certified Coach, Trainer, and the Founder of VJ Coach, she has worked with more than 400 clients across career change, job search, leadership growth, and entrepreneurship. 

Her approach focuses on helping people move away from endless applications and towards building careers with intention, where they understand their value and learn how to create opportunities that align with the global remote work economy. Working remotely from Spain and Finland, she coaches in English, Spanish, and Finnish, bringing a perspective shaped by both global exposure and real hiring experience.

Through VJ Coach, her work extends into Finland’s public sector, where she helps build modern employment services by equipping teams with AI-powered tools and a growth mindset. This allows employment professionals, who already bring deep commitment and local knowledge, to expand their impact and guide job seekers towards global opportunities, opening new doors that are now within reach in those roles where one can work remotely.

Outside work, she moves through life much like anyone balancing ambition and presence, between family, friends, beach volleyball, and dancing, always working towards a sense of balance that, on some days, comes together more easily than others, and on others, asks for patience.

Where It All Began: AI Meets Public Employment

Long before AI became part of public employment conversations, Virpi was already working at the intersection of tech, startups, gaming, and global career development. After moving to Spain with her multicultural family, she launched her coaching business in 2018 and began collaborating with Wisar, an early AI-driven job matching platform focused on global freelance opportunities.

That experience opened Virpi’s eyes to how AI can change recruitment and career paths, and how, at the same time, people wanted more flexibility and to be able to work from anywhere in the world.

Later, she got to collaborate with Comunidad Valenciana, helping the city of Alicante build its startup ecosystem, which again expanded her views and was an incredible learning experience about bringing startups and the public sector closer to each other and about how AI and blockchain solutions can be used also in traditional and regulated sectors like finance and insurance.

So, when she re-built her coaching business, and later in 2025 launched their flagship training and coaching program VJ Coach’s Growth Sprint, all the tech and startup acceleration approach was all already part of their methods – and it had worked.

Over the past 5 years, collaborating as part of Finland’s Startup Foundation and working with hundreds of clients, they had gained traction and got employed when they learned to use new tools, updated their technical skills, and differentiated by using AI-enhanced search strategies, portfolios, online CVs, pitch decks, and didn’t only follow mainstream job counselling advice.

But this was not scalable. While she loves supporting the clients directly and continues to do so also part-time, it’s not fast or big enough if they would teach these methods and coach one client at a time. We are living in an era of one of the fastest tech revolutions, where AI has, in a few years, disrupted sector after another. We need to think bolder, bigger, and faster.

That’s how the concept of “train the trainers” was developed, so that employment professionals could first become the ambassadors of modern AI enhanced career coaching and then bring these methods and tools forward to thousands and make them accessible inclusively, equally, and for free for any unemployed job seeker. This way, they can really create even nationwide impact faster than ever before.

Therefore, VJ Coach works with municipalities, cities, and employment services – bringing AI, international growth mindset, and startup methods into employment services, helping counsellors build on their existing strengths and move towards co-creating new opportunities together with their clients.

How is this reshaping job coaching in Spain?

Not just in Spain, but it’s pushing them forward fast everywhere, especially in sectors related to eg. business and tech, where it affects their own, their client’s, and partner’s environment.

AI is already commonly used in career coaching as a “virtual assistant” (AI agent) that can help doing CV reviews, can find the best matching hidden jobs based on clients’ strengths or plan the mock interview, tasks related more to the career counselling side while human is less replaceable on the coaching side: the mental and emotional side, mindset change, building confidence and accountability for example are not as easy to delegate to their AI-coworkers.

Virpi also believes it’s important to talk about the fears all this brings up, which are very natural and can actually be very similar to what their own clients might have:

• How can I compete with all the AI out there?
• Where should I even start, and how to keep up with all the development?
• Will I even be needed if AI is going to be handling most of my job in the future?

 

Her answer is: clients don’t need just “more AI.” They need support in handling the AI jungle and feeling confident where and how to use it, and where also not to.

Privacy matters. AI shouldn’t be pushed just anywhere either, and there are areas where it currently cannot yet be applied safely for privacy or security reasons, and that is also important to keep in mind, especially when working with people’s data and confidential information.

Projecting forward, the advantage will sit with solutions that balance multiple demands at once: globally and remotely moving workforce, gig-economy, customer-centric design, secure data handling, regulatory compliance, and automation, without removing human accountability from final decisions. Those systems are likely to define the next phase of public sector transformation.

Helping Clients Move from Job Seeking to Opportunity Creation

Career disruptions today often expose a deeper issue: people are still applying with outdated playbooks in a system that has quietly changed. Virpi’s work often begins at that exact point of friction.

This is a very common situation. For example, a client with a highly educated background who had had a great career hadn’t needed to apply for jobs in the past 10-15 years, as they had always been promoted and progressing nicely, until there had been some big change, like a layoff or, for example, a person moved into a new country.

The job market, tools nor the unwritten rules of the job search are not the same as 10 years ago, not to even mention cultural differences between different job markets or countries. The person applied for dozens or even hundreds of jobs just like 10 years ago, but gets stuck in the loop: apply → wait → silence or rejection → lose confidence → apply again.

They flipped the whole approach.

Instead of “How to improve the design of your CV,” they worked on: “What is your unique combination of strengths, what value can you create, and who would benefit most from it?”

They used AI in a very practical way:

1. Clarifying direction: Clarifying career goals and identifying a variety of strengths, then concepting and grouping them with the help of AI.
2. Opportunity list: Using AI to build a lead list of organisations and business signals where their value would matter, including hidden and global remote opportunities.
3. Showcasing: Creating demos or portfolios with AI solutions that best showcase their talent, and then reaching out to people you could help.

The turning point wasn’t a perfect CV.

It was the moment they realised: “I can start conversations, create my own opportunities, and I don’t have to wait for permission to apply.”

AI Tools and Techniques Behind High-Impact Workshops

High engagement in workshops rarely comes from tools alone. It comes from how people are guided to rethink their own approach. Virpi’s sessions consistently land because they don’t just introduce AI, they reframe what job searching can look like when people stop waiting and start building.

Basic things are keeping things interactive, exploratory, and alternating with both training and group coaching methods. And then they use AI to turn job seeking upside down.

Instead of only applying for open job announcements, they explore how people can “head hunt” their own opportunities:

• Build uniquely matching lead lists with AI.
• Expand job search into global remote roles, startups, freelancing, and co-founding.
• And learn to approach the hidden job market in a smart way.

 

This is often THE AHHAA moment when eyes light up and the most common thing people mention when asking about their biggest learnings of the day, year after year.

Designing Career Coaching Programs with AI Integration

Traditional career coaching focuses on fixing CVs. Virpi’s work has leaned toward something more practical, giving people tools they can use immediately, instead of feeling pressured to spend months on overwhelming courses before getting started.

For her, it always comes back to one principle: Don’t just give the fish, give the tools so the client can have fun fishing.

The magic happens when people realise:

• “It doesn’t mean spending months – I can get started in 20 minutes.”
• “I can do this.”

 

In practice, her framework is: mindset (why) + technical knowhow (what) + strategy (how). AI is perfect for this because it acts like a springboard. It opens possibilities, boosts one’s skillset, and all this leads into building one’s confidence.

Adapting Finnish Growth Mindset Strategies to Spain

Transferring ideas across countries is rarely about copying systems. It is about understanding what travels well and what needs to be rebuilt from scratch. Virpi’s experience across Finland and Spain demonstrates that balance.

Firstly, she wouldn’t consider herself as one of the most influential AI women, as being modest is a core part of Finnish culture; in Finland, you usually let the results speak for themselves and don’t want to make a big fuzz about it. The happiest country in the world for the 9th time in a row, no big deal

And secondly, she emphasizes that this hasn’t been done alone. Being a freelancer or solo entrepreneur doesn’t mean one should do it all alone. She collaborates with a group of excellent people and partners with 27 awesome cities and municipalities, including awesome co-creator partners like the employment regions of Turku and Kouvola.

It is thanks to them and her fellow AI Trainer Lasse Rouhiainen, Sales and Business Development Expert Tarja Castel, Marketing Specialist Denisa Pirvu, and many others that they are on this journey together and continue growing together.

But looking things from outsider perspective already for almost 10 years maybe she can help and boost her home country a bit – of course each country has their local realities and challenges, but there are principles that travel especially well here and what would probably be welcomed easily into any public sector development: Finland being a smaller and more agile country has been a great pioneer for quickly starting to test new things, co-creating and developing together the new concept. She doesn’t think this would be possible everywhere in the world, at least this fast, in just a few months.

One concrete universal challenge that the Spanish job market (like many other countries as well) is losing workforce from rural areas to bigger cities, and seeing unemployment grow in smaller towns.

This is where Virpi believes AI and growth thinking could play a part and change things in a very practical way: By equipping job seekers with tools, methods, and a new mindset also in Spain, they can create more remote-job and freelance opportunities for people who want to return to their roots, to work remotely from their home towns while enjoying the calmer life style of “pueblos.”

The adaptation is not just directly copying the Finnish system to Spain. It’s about transferring the best principles and co-creating jobs where they didn’t exist before by:

• Empowering people with modern tools
• Teaching experimentation and a growth mindset
• And building confidence through action.

 

Applying Gaming and Startup Methods to the Public Sector

The most valuable lessons from gaming and startups are not about technology itself, but about how work gets done. That mindset has formed how she approaches public sector transformation.

Funny enough, the most important thing is not one specific AI innovation. It’s a way of working that’s common in startups and gaming: exploring, co-creation with customers, and fast iterations.

They start with something, test it with their users/clients, learn, and keep improving and customising all the time. That applies to working with large organisations and small municipalities alike.

AI simply makes iteration faster: draft → test → improve. Like building game assets or movie trailers…with AI in minutes instead of weeks.

Why She Launched VJ Coach

At the core of her work sits a simple observation: there is far more potential in both people and systems than what is currently being used. That gap became the reason to build something new.

Virpi just wants to help the job seekers – and she saw a lot of underutilised potential.

Underutilised potential among job seekers (incredible talents not getting jobs), and underutilised potential in the system and infrastructure. And on the other hand, so many people’s encouraging feedback on the way and desire to change things. All that encouraged her to go forward.

AI helps employment coordinators shift from traditional advisory to value creation because by finding effective technical solutions to help with time consuming daily tasks and automating repeating administrative workflows, they can save a lot of time, remove friction, and speed up practical outputs.

This then results in being able to better focus on each client’s individual situation and provide more value as a service. We can lead by example, be the ambassadors of modern global employment support.

From Managing Unemployment to Building Solutions

The shift from reactive systems to proactive ones often hinges on a single change in perspective. In her workshops, that shift begins with how AI is positioned.

AI is not an “answering machine.” It’s rather their virtual assistant and coworker that also needs time, clear instructions, and training to succeed.

That’s how they move from managing unemployment → to building solutions for every day challenges.

The key is: inspiration first, then let people test themselves. The most effective workshops always include interactive exercises. Action learning.

A few concrete examples of what they have been doing in their workshops over the years with both personnel and their clients: in less than 30 minutes, people can train their AI-agent, start vibe coding, or build a targeted lead list of uniquely targeted organisations and hidden job signals.

They often start with the training part (so people get inspired, learn the tools, and see examples), and then continue with group or individual coaching to go deeper and make it personal, so that all the learnings will be brought to life and practised right away.

Advice for Coaches on Using AI for Inclusive Career Growth

The rise of AI has not reduced the need for human connection. If anything, it has made that contrast sharper. Her advice reflects that tension between technology and lived experience.

What their VJ Coach AI consultant Lasse Rouhiainen always says: it’s human – AI – human that brings the best results. Not AI alone. And humans should always be at the end, verifying the final results.

And while AI and remote work rise, so actually does the demand for genuine real interaction. AI cannot live in the same way the rollercoaster of emotions that they face daily with clients: the fear, the frustration, the joy, and the feeling of being seen by another human being.

Correspondingly, Equality work matters, and it’s already happening, but they need more. There are many organisations doing important work to close the gender gap in tech and AI.

For example: Women in AI (WAI), Women in Tech®, Women Techmakers. These are just a few examples of communities that are crucial, because the gap is still real. Globally, less than a third of technology professionals are women, and without active support, the gap can widen as tech evolves.

Her practical advice to fellow career coaches and public sector workers: Be curious and playful. 

Virpi encourages asking:

• What are the most repeated tasks you do weekly?
• If you could hire an assistant, what would you delegate?
• Where would you need strategic advisory?
• Where do you spend too much time?
• What do you avoid because it feels technical or overwhelming?
• What would you rather do with all the time that you could get back thanks to AI?

 

Those are often the places where AI can help best, so that they can focus on things and tasks that matter most to their clients and themselves.

Virpi’s journey shows how AI, when paired with human judgment, can shift job coaching from passive guidance to active opportunity creation. Her work bridges systems, people, and technology, proving that scalable impact comes not from tools alone, but from enabling others to think, act, and build differently.