Aerobloggen

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!

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 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.

As most of you already know, every year the universities all over Sweden hosts different job fairs where the students can meet ambassadors from various companies. GKN is usually present at the majority of these fairs to inform the students of available summer jobs, thesis work, regular positions as well as the trainee program. This season’s first fair is called Armada and is hosted by KTH (the Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm today and yesterday (November 19th-20th, 2019). On site we had Tim Hallor, Erik Knutsson and Peter Emvin who represented GKN Aerospace.

Hi there!

This week has been full of meetings with value stream managers, planning our future assignments and travels as well as a nice visit from the Siemens trainees from Finspång! They were interested to know more about what GKN Aerospace is doing and how we work out in the factories, so of course we took it upon us to take them in and to show them around. It was a lot of fun having them here since they are developing gas turbines, which is very similar to an airplane engine. Both of them are partially made out of a gas generator, it is just that we are using it to create propulsion for the aircraft and they are using it to generate electricity, for example. Although, theirs are a lot bigger and heavier since they are used on ground level, and ours need to be light enough to not weigh down the entire plane. After the visit we went to a restaurant here in Trollhättan for a dinner together which was really nice! Now we are really excited to visit Finspång to see their site and how they are working with their products since they are so similar to ours, but used in such a different way.

Hi everyone!

Last week us trainees were on an adventure together. It was our first activity “week” (only three days this time) that we will have continuously in between our four department rotations that lies in our future. These activity weeks are intended for us as newcomers in the industry to broaden our knowledge and to form connections with other companies/GKN sites.

This time we chose to first of all visit GKN Aerospace in Kongsberg, Norway. This site is also producing engine parts to both commercial and military airplanes, just as we are in Trollhättan and that is why it is exceptionally interesting for us. The site in Kongsberg has around 500 employees and was established in 1987 to acquire the assets of the former jet engine division at Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk. It was really exciting and interesting to hear about the different programs they are involved in and to have a guided tour around their factory. We had a lot of discussions about what is to come in the future and the visions for the site in Kongsberg together with the former trainee Peter Hjortsberg, who began his career in Trollhättan but is now president of the site in Norway. A big thank you to Peter for allowing us to visit and for taking the time to meet us!

The day after Kongsberg we went back to Sweden and to Gothenburg. We took the opportunity to go to Volvo Cars to learn more about their production, as they are focused more towards mass production than GKN Aerospace. We can easily say that everyone got very inspired and motivated to implement some of the aspects at GKN.

The last day of our activity “week” we spent at Aeroseum and SKF. Aeroseum was a fantastic museum to visit to gain a deeper knowledge of the history of our Swedish military aircraft. A part of GKN in Trollhättan are working on military engines, so to be able to see and read more about the history gives us a new perspective that we will bring back to work.

We finished the entire trip with visiting SKF where we got an inspiring tour by Lars Werner. We got an interesting introduction to the company and an insight of how they work through innovation and digitalisation to gain high productivity. After this visit we went home with our heads full of ideas and motivation, just as after Volvo.