Aerobloggen

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.

Hi,

The past few months have gone by fast and we are in the last work week before the holidays. This period has been very educational for all of us trainees, from interviewing colleagues at GKN to working with our individual assignments. Now the time has come to rest up for two weeks of visits and training in California and Charleston (more on this coming soon).

During the week we have spent two days at Bohusgården and participated in training and workshops within working methods and conflict management. Everything went well and we have now completed four out of our six training days at Bohusgården. Now it’s time to recharge the batteries for a hectic first month of the new year.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,
From the Trainees to you.

Hi everyone!

The day has finally come, the application to become a part of the next year’s Young Graduate group has now opened!

You can read more about the Young Graduate Program here on the website under the tab “THE YOUNG GRADUATE PROGRAM”. If you have more questions regarding the program or the company in general please contact us at aerotrainees@gknaerospace.com and we will help as best as we can!

Follow this link to apply: https://careers.gknaerospace.com/job/Trollhattan-Graduate-Trainee/574656101/

Looking forward to having you as our future colleague! Yay!

Hi and happy Saint Lucy’s Day to you all!

This week has been quite uneventful from the trainee assignment perspective, which means that we have been able to be extra productive at our department we are currently at. (Yay!) Although, a big event for this week have certaintly been the Christmas party that Young @ GAS arranged.

Young @ GAS is a community for and created by the employees who are 36 years or younger working at the GKN site in Trollhättan . They usually arrange activities such as networking fika, lunches and different events throughout the year. This provides an opportunity for you to meet with people whose paths you probably would not have crossed otherwise, which is super fun! This week was the Christmas party as mentioned and we, the trainees, were responsible for the entertainment during the night. Music quiz, charades and other games were on the schedule and at the end of the night the team “The 2019 trainees are the best” stood victorious. I think they might have tried to flatter us with their chosen team name. Which of course worked.