The time has come for the last person in the graduate group to take the stage! Like for my fellow colleagues you can find out more about me and my background in the tab The young graduate program à Our young graduates.

I am the second graduate engineer belonging to the International Graduate Program (IGP), and I will, just like David, stay at my department for a consecutive 6 month period. GKN Aerospace consists of three branches, namely Military, Commercial and Space. I am employed at the Commercial Military department. It will be extremely interesting and exciting to get the possibility to be a part of a, to me, new field!

I am now part of project group together with some very eminent people. The purpose of this group is to work with something called export control. What is that you ask?

Export control means that we as a company knows WHAT is delivered to WHOM and that there exist relevant licenses for every export made. It is not only export of hardware in the form of actual details that are subject to export control rules but also things like drawings, knowledge and oral information. Everything subjected to export control regulations is given a class depending on how “secret” they are. The highest export class is given to military products whilst commercial products can be given a lower export class. A license requirement is put on every product based on the export classification. There is a plentitude of different licenses that can be applied for depending on the purpose of the export.

If GKN Aerospace for example wants to buy a military product from a company I the US and subsequently ship it forward to another country an ITAR license is needed. An ITAR license is the license given to the most secret military products in the US. This license must specify both that GKN Aerospace import this product and that we are allowed to ship it forward to the specific country. If we also want to be a part of future maintenance on the product a special license is needed for that as well. To further complicate things the US and Europe use different classification systems that have to be kept in mind.

During the next 6 month I will driving a project with the purpose of building a system support to how we handle export control. This will be done to simplify the process and to minimize the amount of manual work leading to a decreased risk of errors during the process.

This is a very complex but important area and I have so far only scratched the surface. I am very much looking forward to plunge right in to the exciting field of export control!