Aerobloggen

What a week! Something you´ve probably noticed with so many blogposts during a short time-span. Although we haven’t had the time to describe all activities so thought it could be good with a little summary of the week.

This Monday we went to Finspång, small city outside Linköping to visit Siemens and their graduates. They visited us last autumn so this time it was out turn to learn more about their organization.

We got to see final assembly of their gas turbines and also a so called “single lift”, which is a fully assembled gas turbine with control room and much more. It is the heaviest product Siemens have delivered for several years and weighed over 250 tons, so was really exciting to witness! We also got insights regarding their push within AM (additive manufacturing) which gave us a lot of inspiration to bring back!

Fun fact regarding the manufacturing in Finspång is that a castle was included in the purchase of the production plant in the 1800s, which means that the castle has followed all companies that have taken over the production area since then. Siemens officially took over 2003 and the castle is today their visitor center as you can see in our magnificent photo below.

Big thanks for a really interesting afternoon!

Ps. The cannons located around the castle are there for historical reasons, the land was first used for manufacturing cannons before gas turbines started to be produced.

On Tuesday it was time for the LARM career fair, almost all graduates where there (Hampus was at Futurum) and advertised GKN and the Global Graduate Program. It was especially for us to partake when so many interested and curios students came by!

During Tuesday and Wednesday it was also the last days at Futurum, I have already written a bit about that last week but have been really rewarding days. Both through inspiring high school students and the possibility to improve our presentation skills.

Lastly, we spent Thursday and Friday at “space days” at Universeum in Gothenburg, where we had our VR system and let the visitors try it out, which you can see in the picture below!

Looking ahead it seems that the graduate activities will slow down a bit which will be quite nice. Been some fun and rewarding weeks but will be good to be able to put 100% effort on our rotations!

Hope you all have a pleasant weekend!

The trainees are now at LARM career fair!

Are you also interested in the aviation and space industry? Are you up for exciting and challenging projects? Do you want to be a part of a team that makes things fly? Do you want to learn more about us? Drop by our booth and we´ll tell you more about us!

PS: Only 6 days left of the application period so don’t forget to apply to the GKN Aerospace Global Graduate Programme 2020. Click here to send in your application!

Time has really flown by for the trainee-group lately. It feels like something we say quite often, but now that we have come home from the trip across the pond (January 25th) it has been non-stop of various fun activities. First of all, we have actually switched rotations, which is a bit wistful because you may not have gotten get as far as you would have wanted with the project in 10 weeks, but it is really fun to try something new! It will be really interesting for me to gain experience within Finance/Business Development as I will work with M&A (Mergers & Acquisitions).

In addition to our new rotations we have clearly noticed that the recruitment process is at full speed, as GKN is participating in four career fairs over the course of 1.5 weeks! CHARM (Gothenburg), Trainee Day (Gothenburg), Hotspot (Karlstad) and LARM (Linköping). The trainees were at CHARM and will be participating on the Trainee Day as well as LARM next week, so we hope to see you there!

Lastly, we have taken the opportunity to participate in events to spread the interest in technology and aviation/space to youths. Right now we are participating at Futurum here in Trollhättan, an event orchestrated by Innovatum with the purpose to inspire high school students to continue with their studies and to work in various exciting professions! The event is over 6 days and over 750 students from all over Fyrbodal (Fyrbodal is a fusion of the cities Trollhättan, Uddevalla, Vänersborg and Lysekil, as well as Bohuslän and Dalsland) visit during these days!

Been extremely fun to be able to talk a bit about my own journey and GKN as well as why the aviation industry and our own technology and products are exciting!

To give you a small taste of what our presentation was about, you can find a short clip below that we have put together. The video shows three companies that all develop so-called eVTOL, electric vertical takeoff and landing. That is, small electric aircraft that can lift and land vertically, so that they can easily be used in cities. This, if anything, is futuristic technology that is becoming a reality right now!

So it has been some hectic and fun weeks that will continue on keeping the same pace for at least another week, so you can expect a lot of updates from us going forward!

The time had come to leave the West Coast and to meet the rest of our Global Graduates in Charleston, South Carolina. It was great fun to get back together with our friends that we last met in September. Now it was time to start Training week 1 with workshops in self-awareness, personal image and communication skills. As expected, the workshops were both fun and useful, for example we got to work on our presentation skills using the ABCD framework (Google it!).

During the Wednesday we had a study visit at the GKN plant in Orangeburg, about an hour outside Charleston. There we got an introduction in the technologies they work with and the products they produce. This was the fourth facility we’ve visited as Global Graduates but the first on the Aerostructures side of the business, which is the largest product group. It was cool to see how lip skins (the front “edge” of the engine, very important for aerodynamic performance!) are formed, for example to be used in the newly developed GE9X engine. GE9X won the Guinness World Record for strongest commercial jet engine, showing the ability to produce nearly 600kN of thrust – enough to lift a weight of 61 tons! This engine will be used for the new Boeing 777x, which recently had its maiden flight.

In addition to this, we had a course in Zero Defects, which is an important tool being deployed throughout the aerospace industry right now. Zero Defects is a work standard aimed at the reduction of defects in products through prevention. In the aerospace industry, we have extremely high requirements of product quality – after all, nobody wants to put people’s lives at risk by using damaged or defective goods. Therefore, it is important that everyone in the industry works together to create safe products.

This was everything from our USA trip,

Thank you for reading and see you soon!

The next university career fair GKN is visiting is CHARM so make sure to go past our charming booth (bdm tss) on 4th and 5^th of Feb. 

At our booth you can test our VR experience where you will get to know the company and learn more about our products! Don’t forget to ask about the Graduate Program and what jobs/thesis options we offer. At the booth we will have our representatives Peter Emvin, Marcus Johansson, Sören Knuts, Maria Östman, Magnus Hallberg and 3 of the trainees.

We also want to remind all of you to apply for the Graduate Program before Sunday the 16th of February!

After the first half of our activity week had been spent in Los Angeles it was time for us to move on to San Francisco. The entire Wednesday was needed to drive those 589 kilometers (365 miles) that seperate the two cities and wow, the sights that we saw! We took the opportunity to go on Highway 1 which is located along the shoreline of California and we got to see waterfalls, sea lions and the sunset over the sea. It was amazing! We can highly recommend that for other travellers.

While in the San Francisco area we took the opportunity to attend the Nordic Future Mobility Summit at Stanford University. This was an event that stretched over a couple of days and aimed to build a bridge between the Nordic countries and Silicon Valley regarding the future of logistics and creative solutions surrounding it. It was very interesting to be apart of and especially to be able to hear several people who have been in the industry a long time discuss where the future is heading within the fields of automation and innovation. From the two workshops that we attended, “The Future of Logistics” and “Internationalization: Research, Education and Innovation”, we got to hear from Luca Delgrossi (VP Automation vid Volvo Group) and Frode Langmoen (Technology Executive , ISV & Developer Relations IBM Nordic), amongst others.

Since Stanford University is close to Silicon Valley we took the opportunity to visit Google Plex and Apple HQ as well. It was exciting to see these places and how they have achieved to display their products in an innovative way. There were a lot of solutions that inspired us! Especially the campus display at Apple that is presented in the video below.

 

When the weekend arrived we went to downtown San Francisco to truly act like the tourists that we were. We visited the Golden Gate bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf and Alcatraz. It was a really nice day and later became the day that ended our adventures on the West coast, because on Sunday it was time to fly out to the East coast for our first Development Week with the other Global Graduates!

 

We have finally arrived in the land of freedom and started our second activity week, which is in California. The first few days were spent around Los Angeles, where we took the Monday to visit one of our sites in Santa Ana, roughly an hour by car from downtown LA. We were greeted by the site HR manager, Leslie Gelle, who took us on an educational tour of their facilities and workshops. The GKN Aerospace Santa Ana site manufactures honeycomb panel structures. In principle, these are made of two thin metal sheets with a grid in between, which resembles a honey comb. The result works a bit like a thermos, and minimizes transfer of heat and noise to the surroundings.

The parts that are made using honey comb plates are predominantly located in the rear part of the engine. Besides the tour, we met site manager Scott Gulyas for an interesting discussion about the future development of the site. We also took the chance to catch up with one of our fellow Global Graduate colleagues, Honi Ahmadian-Tehrani.

The season for career fairs at the universities in Sweden has just started and yesterday GKN Aerospace was at the career fair LARV, which is hosted by Luleå University of Technology.

We hope that a lot of you had the opportunity to visit us at the stand and talk airplanes and space with our representatives Emma Winblad von Walter, Sören Knuts and Pär Nylander!

We also want to remind all of you to apply for the Graduate Program before Sunday the 16th of February!

Hi everyone!

I hope you all have had a nice Holiday and a great New Year’s! We are back to work again after the long Holiday break and are excited about our new rotations, as well as the trips we have planned for this year. Right now we have a kind of “in the middle of everything” week before going to the US. So our schedule right now is just filled with getting everything ready for the trip and finishing all the leftover work from last year.

Do you remember when we went to Kongsberg in Norway and to Gothenburg in September 2019 to visit companies and learn more about the industry? Well, now it is time for a similar trip but this time it will take place on the other side of the pond we like to call the Atlantic ocean. This Saturday we will fly to Los Angeles to visit the GKN site in Santa Ana and our supplier Carlton Forge Works that manufactures forgings to GKN. A few days after that we will take the car up to San Francisco for some more adventure and then we will fly to the East Coast to meet all the other global graduates in Charleston for a week. It is going to be a lot of fun! It has been a while since we have seen everyone.

We will keep the blog updated during these weeks, so keep an eye out for posts so that you can virtually come with us on our activities!

Have a great 2020 and to all of you soon-to-be graduated students out there – do not forget to apply for the Trainee Program! The application is open now.