Wanted by recruiters and companies

At Chalmers he heard a rumor that shipping was a limited industry with few jobs. It couldn't be more wrong, says Alexander Johansson, who does not regret for a second that he applied for the Lighthouse Trainee program after his master's degree. Now recruiters and companies contact him almost every week.

Already in the first year of Chalmers' mechanical engineering education, Alexander Johansson was aware that there was a master's program called Naval architecture. And that sounded quite interesting. But then there was that, as he says, bad reputation that was spread by the students a few classes over: There were no jobs in the shipping industry, you had to move abroad to get one and so on.

“The reputation is a bit of the industry's problem, it doesn't have the natural visibility that, for example, the car industry has”, he says.

Actually, it was to the car industry that the path was laid out for him. Since childhood, he had had a burning interest in vehicles and engines, and his high school years were spent at the Gothenburg Technical Gymnasium, which is owned by Volvo and the city of Gothenburg.

- There was a lot of Volvo for a few years. I practiced at the crash department, the assembly line, eight weeks in the factory in Belgium, summer jobs and so on.

When he applied to Chalmers straight after high school, he was tired of the car industry. Not because the time at Volvo was bad in any way – it was simply time to do something else. For Alexander, who spent several weeks every summer on the west coast in the family's motorboat, the step to seafaring was not far.

“I found a summer job as a skipper at a company called More Sailing in Croatia. We sailed larger charter boats and with that my interest in boats and sailing grew more and more, yes so much so that I bought my own sailboat.”

After graduating, he continued sailing with the company for a year, across the Atlantic and in the Caribbean, until the pandemic put an end to operations in March 2020.

“Then I got in touch with an old classmate who studied at Naval architecture and who said that he was very satisfied with the program. That's what I needed to hear to apply.”

After his master's degree, he entered the Lighthouse trainee program. From September 2022, he practiced for a year at four different workplaces – the Swedish Maritime Administration, Saab Kockums, Stena Teknik and MacGregor – in three-month intervals. And that is precisely what is the best thing about the Trainee programme, Alexander thinks.

“The companies were very keen to show off their entire business. This means you get to get to see a lot, which you don't normally do unless you have such a job role. There were a lot of study trips and such. I don't know how many pilot stations I visited with the Swedish Maritime Administration and at Saab Kockums I got to go out to the yard in Malmö. With Stena, I was able to take part in a full-scale heeling test at a shipyard in Gdansk where a Stena ship was extended and rebuilt. I was also involved in a weigh-in with one of Stena's ships that operate Trelleborg-Rostok.”

The longest tripduring the trainee period was to Weihai in China. Alexander was on site at the shipyard for a month (half the time for Stena and half for MacGregor) and worked both in the office and out on the ship building site.

“It was great to see how modern shipbuilding is done in all its different steps. It was everything from raw sheet metal and steel that comes in, is assembled into blocks that are then assembled into a ship. It was of course also very educational and fascinating to come to a completely new culture and see how it works”, says Alexander.

It sounds like you got to be part of a lot as a Lighthouse Trainee. Is the program something you want to recommend?

“Yes, of course. I last tried to market it yesterday at a Christmas table with students. Of course you should apply, I said, you will stand out among all those looking for a job next year if you have completed the program. You get broad knowledge, experience and get to try a lot, it's a perfect interlacing between study and work. In addition, you get a perfectly good salary during.

On the last of September, Alexander's trainee year was over. The next day he started his new job as a technical sales engineer at Berg propulsion.

“I work with both technology and customer management, it's a mixed role that suits me and I enjoy it very much. The salary and the location of the office on Hönö here outside Gothenburg is also good.”

But that does not mean that the contact with the companies he practiced at is broken.

“No, the contact network you get is extremely important. The other week, for example, I was out at Stena Teknik to talk about a possible project, and then of course it's good if they know who you are and what you stand for, that you already have a relationship. It helps a lot”, says Alexander, who has had to get used to being sought after.

“It's almost crazy actually, but recruiters and people at companies get in touch almost every week to hear if you're available.”

More information on Lighthouse trainee programme