Preparations for the second New Year 2009!

China is even more bustling with energy than usual these days because next week the Chinese will celebrate the year's most important holiday - the Chinese New Year, also called Spring Festival or Lunar New Year. All offices are closed for the whole week and people go home to their families and celebrate with lots of traditional food, visiting relatives and sending up enormous amounts of fireworks into the sky on the Eve, which falls on this coming Sunday. In skyscrape-filled Shanghai my sister (who's coming to visit me) and I must find a high place from where we can see the light show!

This means however that this week and last week have been even more intense than usual in the Elkem Shanghai office. Last week all salesmen were out visiting customers, wishing them happy new year and toasting to their continued success. This week everyone is working hard to finish their tasks on time. I'm working mainly on two different projects, both are related to mapping potential customers for new products/applications. Until now it has been a lot of desktop job, and also some collaboration with our other offices in Asia (Tokyo, Mumbai, Bangkok...) , but I'm looking forward to actually visiting the first customers which I'm doing together with two of our technical sales guys (or actually, one of them is a woman) in a few weeks time, when we are going to Malaysia.

Before Christmas I visited our research lab in Beijing, and also got the chance to have a meeting with one of the professors in the China Building Materials Academy. The photo of me in front on the academy building was taken by our very nice lab manager Lin.

Even though Christmas is not celebrated except by the department stores and the Christian minority in China, we still had a company Christmas party. The photos show the happy Elkem crew in Shanghai and the excellent Norwegian and (mainly) Chinese food we enjoyed in that evening= )

Today after work I'm going for dinner with one of the girls in the office, Cindy. We had a dinner some weeks ago and found out that we have to continue a very interesting discussion on differences and similarities between Chinese and European culture... it's not a topic that you can finish easily!

Introduction of myself and being a trainee in Elkem

Hello! I'm a new blogger at Orklajobs.com so I will, just like my fellow bloggers, take the opportunity to introduce myself. I was hired as a trainee in Elkem in May 2007, shortly after graduating from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden with a degree in Industrial Engineering and management. The reason for me to apply for a position in Elkem was actually that Orkla was one of the few Norwegian companies I knew something about since before (and to all fellow clueless Swedes out there - Norway is actually a very nice country to work and live in= ) , but I also knew that I wanted to work in an industrial company. Hence, I looked up the industrial companies in the Orkla group and found that Elkem offered a 2-year trainee programme that sounded to fit me well. Scroll time ahead a couple of weeks and some interviews later, and I was already started at my first trainee position, in the business development department at the headquarters in Oslo.

The first eight months passed quickly with analyses of various customer segments, raw material markets, internal projects etc. At that time I changed to a position within the Aluminium division (for those not in the know, Elkem has 8 divisions: Silicon, Foundry, Solar, Energy, Research, Materials, Carbon and Aluminium, the latter just sold to Alcoa which leaves us with 7) where I worked with logistics projects, mainly in order to improve out-going logistics flows from the two Norwegian plants via the distribution centre in Rotterdam to the customers. Another eight months later it was time to change again, and I started in the Materials division where I am currently working, based in the sales & purchasing office in Shanghai.

I arrived in Shanghai early November last year, but I am still amazed by the size, the noise, the opportunities, the number of people everywhere... More about what it is like to work and live here, I will save for my next post. Let me just say a few things about myself since I claimed that I would introduce not only my job but also, yes right, myself in this post.

I'm 26 years old, grew up in the picturesque small village Kivik by the southeast coastline in Sweden, moved to Gothenburg when I was 18 to start at the technical university and lived there until I moved to Oslo in 2007, with the exception of an exchange year in lovely hot Singapore. And here comes the hard part when you are supposed to talk about your "hobbies"... so what should I say? I like travelling, spending time with friends and my boyfriend Carl (who "by co-incidence" is also working for Orkla, in Stabburet), reading books (now reading "Revolutions" by Nobel Prize winner J M Le Clézio, highly recommended!) the occasional visit to the gym... I also have a weakness for fashion magazines, sushi (and a lot of other good food) and red wine.

If you have any questions regarding Orkla, Elkem, some things I have written about or something completely else, feel free to make a comment below and I will answer it. Have a nice day and hope to see you here again!