Scania and Sandvik providing workshop experience to engineering undergraduates

Scania and Sandvik providing workshop experience  to engineering undergraduates

A guaranteed summer job that is worth six college credits and pays a salary at
the same time. This year, Scania and Sandvik are providing workshop experience
to 65 engineering undergraduates in Sweden. The project is an investment in the
future and one way of ensuring that the country can continue to pursue advanced,
profitable industrial production.

Production engineering is a subject that has declined in popularity among the
students at Sweden's university-level engineering schools, though a slight
upturn has been discernible in the past two years. To reverse the negative
trend, for the third straight year Scania is offering a summer of practical
production workshop training in order to attract more undergraduate to choose a
specialisation in production engineering. Last year, Swedish-based metals and
equipment group Sandvik also took up the challenge and is accepting 23
engineering undergraduates this year. 

The two industrial groups emphasise that product development is a competitive
tool that generates economic growth and keeps jobs in Sweden. Another aim of the
practical workshop training programme is to recruit qualified engineers as
employees. 

“Recruiting highly skilled employees is a key issue in the Swedish engineering
industry. We must make a more concerted effort to ensure a continued supply of
graduate engineers. We at Scania and Sandvik regard these workshop training
weeks as one of the best ways of presenting the company and all the exciting
jobs available in the production engineering field. At the same time,
undergraduates get a chance to gain important practical experience,” says Thomas
Karlsson, Senior Vice President in charge of Scania's component production.

“We need qualified, capable employees. If we are to be competitive, given our
high labour cost situation, we must rely on both technology and people. The
practical workshop training programme is a good way of marketing ourselves to
students,” says Kjell Söderhäll, General Manager Sandvik Production Gimo. 

Scania's summer practical workshop training programme lasts seven weeks,
Sandvik's nine weeks. Both provide a mix of hands-on production work and theory.
One much-appreciated element of the programme is project work aimed at
identifying potential production improvements, which students present to the
factory managers at the company at the end of their workshop training period.
To date, Scania has hired five former participants in its summer practical
workshop training programme, and one programme participant is currently doing a
graduation project at the company.

“The summer programme at Scania gave me a good understanding of the company and
of how production looks in the real world, as opposed to schoolbooks. It gave me
useful knowledge to be so close to production machinery,” says Emma Skoglund,
who has both attended the summer programme and completed a graduation project at
Scania and now works there as a pre-production engineer.

For further information, please contact: Hans-Åke Danielsson, Press Manager, 
tel. +46 8 553 856 62, e-mail hans-ake.danielsson@scania.com 





Scania is one of the world's leading manufacturers of trucks and buses for heavy
transport applications, and of industrial and marine engines. A growing
proportion of the company's operations consists of products and services in the
financial and service sectors, assuring Scania customers of cost-effective
transport solutions and maximum uptime. Employing 32,800 people, Scania operates
in about 100 countries. Research and development activities are concentrated in
Sweden, while production takes place in Europe and South America, with
facilities for global interchange of both components and complete vehicles. In
2006, invoiced sales totalled SEK 70.7 billion and the net income amounted to
SEK 5.9 billion. 


Scania press releases are available on the Internet at www.scania.com