Last week was a very interesting week for sure! Not only did I get the opportunity to have lunch with Christopher Podgorski, Senior Vice President Trucks. But I also got to meet a bodybuilder and visited a dealer and the distributor in Sweden.

Wait what, bodybuilder? What does this have to do with work?

As some of you might know, a concrete mixer on a truck as an example is not made by the truck manufacturer, it’s made by a bodybuilder. So a bodybuilder in this case is not the same definition that you can find on Wikipedia (“Bodybuilding is the use of progressive resistance exercise to control and develop one’s musculature”), it’s a company building bodies for trucks. The world of bodybuilders (haha) is a totally different thing than the modularised world we are used to at Scania. We often compare our product with Lego, and that our strength is that we are the best at combining the Lego parts together in a structured way so that the Lego box does not look like the floor of a messy children’s room. But when it comes to bodybuilding, everything is custom made. So basically, it is like putting Lego, Duplo and building blocks together and expect that it doesn’t fall apart when someone is moving.

The meeting with the bodybuilder didn’t have much to do with my current assignment. But this is one of the advantages with being a trainee – you can join in on meetings and go on study visits just to learn something new even if it is not super relevant to your current tasks. It was a really interesting meeting with a lot of technical discussions. This is definitely a priceless experience for me. You might think that this was not really a big deal, but I insure you that it was! I learned a lot!

Last Friday, all of us trainees were booked to visit the Scania dealer in Kungens Kurva and Scania-bilar Sverige AB which is the distributor in Sweden. At both the dealer and the distributor, we got really good presentations where we could ask lots of questions. And at the dealer we also got a tour of two of the three workshops. If it weren’t for the reason that my trainee colleague is working at the dealer this period and wanted to invite us, we wouldn’t have gotten this great opportunity! Definitely a positive thing with being a trainee.

These visits opened up a whole new world with ways of thinking that me and my fellow trainees will take with us and apply in our other work. For many of us, this was the first introduction to sales strategies and how the actual sales- and service organization works. It was a really educational day!

One thing that I will remember extra strongly are these sayings: “Never stop being a trainee”, “Once a trainee, always a trainee.” The title trainee will disappear, but in that sense that we are changing positions in the company, applying best practice everywhere we go, that we should never stop with. And as I have said before. This is when it starts. Once a trainee, Always a trainee.