10% of Cargotec employees in Finland are trainees - here is why
Offering internships is a fantastic way to give young professionals opportunities to develop themselves. An increasing number of today’s key people at Cargotec started as trainees.
In a LinkedIn post I published few months back, I praised the meeting with our summer trainees at Tampere, Finland. New energy, passion and new ways of thinking has been energising all of us during the summer. I am fully convinced that systematic trainee programmes are one of the best ways for us to build future talent pipelines as well as energise the current organisation.
Seeing the value and investment in trainee programmes is not self-evident. In fact, there has been quite some hesitation coming from our organisation towards the programme. Hesitation has varied from cost pressures, time investment needed for the induction, and readiness of the students to take on “real” work. Easier to say no than yes.
We started our annual summer trainee programme with roughly 20 trainees per year few years go. Year after year, we have increased the number. This year we had 80 trainees. This is nearly 10% seasonal increase in our employee population in Finland. I am quite happy with the number, given the fact that we have quite advanced engineering and functional organisations in Finland. Moreover, 30% of the trainees will stay with the company to continue their traineeship or thesis writing after the summer. Next year we aim to increase the overall number still by 20% in Finland and broaden the programme to other countries too.
Offering internships is a fantastic way to give young professionals opportunities to develop themselves. However, offering traineeships is not only about social responsibility. For us, a traineeship is a way for talent to enter to the company and thus a fantastic recruiting channel. By training and engaging people right from the beginning of their careers, we can help employees commit to the teams and induct them to our business and organisation. An increasing number of today’s key people at Cargotec started as trainees.
Trainees also bring tremendous new energy and “outside the box” thinking to the company. This is vital for our renewal. Renewal of our tools, processes, communicating, running our processes and shaping our attitudes and ways of working. Renewal also about the way we are looking at our strategy, industry and most importantly innovating for the benefit of our customers.
During the past few weeks I participated in multiple different review sessions where trainees have been presenting the outcome of the projects assigned to them over the summer. I have been truly impressed about the energy, passion and out-of-the-box solutions that have been proposed to our business problems. However, most impressive to me has been the optimism and “can do attitude” radiated by our trainees. Everything is possible and challenges are fun.
Injecting this spirit, passion and energy to organisation over summer has created us a long lasting innovation and energy boost. Thank you for all the #cargotecsummer trainees for choosing Cargotec and giving us the incredible boost of energy and fun. We have hope!
Waiting for the summer - welcome back!
Best regards,
Mikko Pelkonen
Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Cargotec
Check out our summer trainee Instagram account #cargotecsummer