Happy Valentine’s Day, dear beloved blog reader!

In these times of love, I send you a warm and hearty greeting from Holland. I know you have all been wondering how I, Joel and Joakim are doing here. Unfortunately, I cannot speak on behalf of my dear friends, but they indeed seem to be on top of the world when we meet every now and then down here. Anyhow, here’s a long-awaited guest blog post from me!

Since the end of October / November, I am located in southern Holland, just outside the country’s second largest city Rotterdam. More precisely, I live in Dordrecht, which is actually the oldest city in Holland and accordingly very cozy. Right in the middle of the old charming neighborhoods, I live in an astonishingly nice apartment. So nice, that during the Christmas holidays I even went back here in time to throw an epic new year´s celebration together with Joel, Jocke, David, Neil and a crew of other friends we´ve got to know down here.

Every morning I do a five minute walk through the beautiful city center and then take the ferry across the river to Fokker Aerostructures in Papendrecht. This site constitutes the headquarters of the Fokker division and in the near future also for the entire GKN Aerostructures. Here I am involved in two projects that both concerns the production of fuselage panels for a new business jet. In one of the projects, we are developing an industrial infrastructure to handle the large metal sheets that are then assembled to the complete aircraft. With sheets over 5m in length, only 0.4mm thick and furthermore with a large amount of holes and perforations, you understand that it is clearly a challenge to lift and transport these fragile products. My role is project support, which means that I am responsible for planning and follow-up on the project, as well as ensuring that all deliverables are covered by the respective sub-projects. It is an interesting work and a very valuable experience for future project manager assignments. The second project is the manufacturing of the very first shipset of the above-mentioned panels, and in this work I am responsible for the daily planning of a segment of the production. A very much challenging task with virtually daily changing conditions arising from customer needs and internal production!

All in all, I am very pleased with life in Holland and I have met many nice people and spent some fun weekends with my Swedish colleagues. Now I also finally start feeling that spring is in the air, and since I will stay here all the way until the end of April, I’m sure that I have many wonderful excursions and adventures to come where I can discover even more of what this country has to offer!