Cross Border trainee Simon: Start of a journey
Hello everybody,
my name is Simon and since September 2014, I am a Cross Border Trainee at LSG Sky Chefs, based in the Operations department at the Stockholm-Arlanda Airport in Stockholm, Sweden. Born and raised in Weil am Rhein, a small town in the southern part of Germany and located at the border to Switzerland and France, I studied International Business and Management Studies at Saxion University of Applied Sciences in Enschede, the Netherlands, prior to joining LSG Sky Chefs in late summer 2014.
The Cross Border program that I am now a part of is a three-year long trainee program by LSG Sky Chefs that offers its participants the opportunity to develop professional skills and knowledge as well as managerial qualities in a global environment that, quite literally, is crossing borders thanks to its highly international focus. This blog will follow my fellow trainees and me over the course of our three-year journey and will give its readers an insight to the program and what it means to be a Cross Border Trainee.
Some of you might ask themselves why I chose this particular trainee program. Well… For one, I always had this inexplicable fascination for aviation. During my studies, I already worked as an intern in the Operations and ULD Management department of Jettainer GmbH, a subsidiary of Lufthansa Cargo, in Raunheim, Germany.
After my studies I decided to do yet another internship, this time at the headquarters of Lufthansa Passage USA in East Meadow, New York. After successfully completing the internship, it was clear to me that I wanted to pursue a career in this fast moving and permanently evolving industry.
But the fascination for aviation was only one of many points that stuck out when I first read the program description on the Lufthansa online job portal. I was also looking for a graduate program that would allow me to take on managerial responsibilities, that would challenge me both as an individual and as a professional and that would allow me to work in an international environment.
In my opinion, LSG Sky Chefs’ Cross Border Graduate Program combines all these aspects and much more. There hardly is a more international graduate program available at the moment. The program is divided in three different one-year assignments which will take each trainee on a journey around the globe. Currently, there are Cross Border Trainees placed in Hong Kong, Johannesburg, London and New York amongst others.
The available positions for the assignments range from Operations to Sales, Finance and Business Development. The choices are plentiful and allow each trainee to determine his or her individual development over the course of the program. Due to the length of each assignment, the trainees get an excellent insight to the respective departments. Beyond that, assigned responsibilities by means of extensive projects challenge each individual and force us to step outside our comfort zone.
These attributes make the Cross Border program very unique in my point of view and therefore, it was never a question for me: I just had to become a Cross Border Trainee.
If you want to know more about my person or the Cross Border program itself, just leave me a comment or visit the official homepage.
Next time, I will let you know what I experienced during my first months here in Stockholm and what it was like to meet all trainees from around the world at the Lufthansa Training and Conference Center in Seeheim, Germany. Until then… Stay tuned and take care!