Aerobloggen

We decided to spend our third and last activity week in Kiruna, where Christian has been our guide after his time at the campus Luleå University has in the city. The rest of us were rookies north of the polar circle!

After flying up on Monday morning, we drove out to the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi just outside of Kiruna, as we did not have any planned study visits until Tuesday morning. The hotel, complete with a church and 55 rooms in ice and snow, was pretty impressing and the guided tour was ended with a mandatory drink in the ice bar.

The Tuesday schedule was more packed, with visits both high and low at Esrange Space Center and the underground LKAB mine. The Esrange rocket launch base was first up in the morning and an especially nice visit as the work there is related to what we do down in Trollhättan. The base was founded in the 1960’s for research on the northern lights, aurora borealis, but focus has with time shifted towards all kinds of research on space, the atmosphere or weightlessness. The largest rocket currently launched at Esrange, the 16 m high Maxus, can for example reach heights of 800 km and offer 12 minutes of weightlessness before falling down to earth again.

Since you as a graduate trainee belong to a group in the company that most likely has time for unplanned tasks, it is also likely that you get to take part in some unexpected events at work. One such event was the reason that we a couple of weeks ago once again was on our way to the Redditch area in the UK, this time to participate in a workshop regarding GKN’s future on invitation of Nigel Stein himself, Chief Executive of GKN Plc.

The workshop, named Future Thinking, was set to gather 50 promising persons in the ages 25-30 from all over GKN and the five of us were proud to represent Trollhättan and Sweden! Together we would brainstorm around what we saw as important in the world, the industry and at the workplace 10-30 years into the future, and how this could affect GKN. With participants from all over the world, an unconfined task like this could be pretty interesting.

With the help of Cranfield University, the result of this brainstorming did however become fairly concise and we had in two days succeeded in creating seven project groups of eight persons each, all with their own focus area to continue to work in. The projects was in areas like alternative transportation, artificial intelligence, branding and cross-functional work and are now intended to proceed on distance for the next year, with regular debriefings to the Chief Executive Council of GKN. It will be exciting to see what the projects will come up to!

Our day in the town of Redditch near Birmingham, UK, was made up by tours of offices rather than shop floors, but this made it no less interesting to us. The offices was namely the head offices of the whole GKN Group and we were there to meet Andrew Harvey and Marisa Kismul, SVP HR for Aerospace and Director HR for Engine Systems, respectively, as well as Scott MacKintosh, Digital Communications Officer.

Our meeting with Scott was interesting as he was reasonably newly employed at GKN with experience from the video game industry and therefore shared many of our experiences from starting to work within a large industrial company. We talked a lot about some IT problems that have emerged within the group as GKN in a relatively fast pace have acquired companies all over the world and what solutions and features we would like to see as Scott now has been appointed the overall responsibility of digital communications. We also talked about GKN’s presence in social media and what plans there were to increase it. A nice surprise was that Scott had read our blog and wanted to promote it throughout the GKN Group, since it was a unique example of successful external communication!

The meeting with Andrew and Marisa was also very rewarding and it was nice to see that there was such interest in the five of us and our graduate program in Trollhättan from the GKN Aerospace top management. Andrew and Marisa spoke about their careers and things they had learned along the way, but we also talked a lot about the setup of our graduate program and the differences and similarities there were with other graduate programs within the GKN Group. Just as with the IT-systems, there are many different graduate schemes within GKN, of which some have been inherited from new companies being incorporated in the group. In this, there are of course possibilities for improvements with, for example, increased exchange between the programs, which sounds good to us!

After our visit to Redditch, we steered the car towards Filton for another GKN site visit.

After the first period at my main department, I have now also started to rotate around at the different departments in the company. Instead of aimlessly jumping between departments I have decided to focus on one specific product family that I most likely will work a lot with in the future, Pratt & Whitney’s new geared turbofan engine PW1000G. I will therefore follow one project in different departments to get an overview of the engine program and the new components as quick as possible and the first stop has been at the manufacturing department. Since the project is in one of its final stages, the manufacturing department is currently working on increasing the production pace, a very interesting work to follow. After the Christmas holidays and our second activity week, I will spend six weeks at the engineering department to get to see the engineering work in the project and following that is another six-week period learning more about the project’s suppliers at the purchasing department. So far, this have been a very good setup for my year as a young graduate and  I plan to finish it with an internship abroad at our site in Newington, Connecticut.

But before all of this, we will have an awaited Christmas holiday with some time off. The first months in working life have been fun but also intense!

As you may know, we have now been away on our first activity week with both study visits and personal development on the itinerary. The week started early on Monday morning with the five of us cramming into a rental car to take us from Trollhättan to Linköping, where the first study visit of the week was planned at Saab.

Finding the right entrance at Saab’s huge premises was not easy, but the roar of Gripen fighter jets in the sky convinced us that we were close. We were welcomed by Linus, one of Saab’s current young graduates, who guided us through the newly built offices to a conference room where we got to meet more people from Saab’s group of young graduates. This first meeting was mostly spent comparing our two young graduate programs and it was interesting to hear that our experiences so far have been similar in many ways.

However, the tour in the JAS 39 Gripen final assembly shop were probalby even more interesting, as we also got to sit in the cockpit of the plane. The fact that the plane we sat in was built in wood and not airworthy by any standards mattered less, it was just as cool to us.

Unfortunately, everything in and around Saab’s premises are very secret and strict photo prohibition comes with it, so you will have to make do with a photo of us from Grästorp!