She’s helping us take advantage of our knowledge

Since December 2019, Elvira Zahirovic has worked as a training coordinator and vocational teacher at Gnosjö Automatsvarvning. She is mainly responsible for providing training in reading drawings, measurement techniques and statistical process control, as well as basic tool and machine knowledge. Her work helps us to provide continued training and skills for our staff and to retain them in the long term.

“Not many companies offer something similar, but here we invest in people. In the long term, this creates stability and profitability – there’s so much potential in each and every one of our employees,” says Elvira.

Investing in the supply of skills is part of Gnosjö Automatsvarvning’s vision of a sustainable industry. Elvira is an essential part of this investment.

Identifying, promoting and justifying skills
Having a vocational teacher associated with the company makes it easier for our employees to boost their skills and thereby also their salary. In Elvira’s own experience, you can get far if you look for good social qualities in staff, while at the same time justifying why the impetus to get ahead is crucial.

“We need skilled staff and if we can’t recruit them, we’ll do it from within. The desire to learn is key here, it’s part of our culture. Skills development is also an important part of the company’s responsibility to make the workplace and professions attractive so that employees can be proud of their job,” she explains.

Human encounters that generate perspectives
There’s a close collaboration with the production managers and the training is individually adapted. The diversity among both the staff and tasks makes Elvira’s job particularly interesting.

“Viewing the challenges from different perspectives –that’s what makes the job exciting. It’s about adults who want to learn new things for their individual careers within the company. Therefore it’s not possible to teach everyone based on the same template. My experience helps to find good ways to move forward,” she says.

In addition to the role as coordinating educator, Elvira also works at Gnosjö Automatsvarvning as a language teacher in professional Swedish several days a week. At the moment she teaches around ten colleagues in two different language groups.

Established in-house test centre
Shortly after Elvira started working as coordinator of the company’s continued training, an in-house test centre was established to validate the employees in various certificate tests.

CNC Teknik2017 is the industry system for validation, further education, development and certification of skills that are required for competitive production. The system includes competence requirements that the industry’s companies formulate and quality assure. For example, green and blue certificates demonstrate basic skills requirements for operators, processors, measurement and production engineers, among others.

“By becoming a test centre, we can now carry out the necessary validations for the various certificates ourselves. We don’t need to go anywhere else, we can evaluate on site instead. It’s going very well so far and the attitude among the students is really positive. All employees must be approved for the green certificate, but we will soon set up new goals,” explains Elvira.