Erik, you've worked at Kemppi for 12 years, and over the years you've gotten to know a lot about the company and its jobs. Let's recap your career path, so your first contact with Kemppi was through the "Get to know work life and earn" internships when you were 15-17 years old?

Yes, that's right. After that in 2011, when I came to work as a summer trainee in the electronics factory, Kemppi as a company and some of the employees were already familiar to me from the previous internships.

The summer internship then became a permanent position and the range of tasks expanded. What did you do?

Quite quickly my job description expanded and I did a wide range of almost everything the department had to offer in terms of various production tasks.

I was also part of the occupational health and safety organisation, where we made improvements to the safety of production workers.

At what point did the IT team get involved?

I studied computer science and I originally applied to Kemppi specifically to join the IT team, but there wasn't any positions available. However, I never forgot my desire to work in IT and over the years I occasionally asked if they had any job opportunities. Finally, the time came when there was a employee shortage in IT for various reasons and Jani Kaukiainen contacted me. And so I moved into IT under Jani's guidance.

Your job title changed to an IT specialist. What kind of tasks did your job involve?

I got the chance to show my skills and started in IT doing mainly local support tasks.

I helped Kemppi's staff and production with IT-related problems and helped to solve various challenges.

My tasks also included installing and supplying IT equipment for new employees, maintaining telephone connections and other basic IT tasks.

I was not familiar with corporate IT, and during the first few months I learned a lot about the systems and services. I was very motivated to learn.

The next step was to change your job title to ICT Specialist, what did this role include?

The tasks remained largely the same as before, but different responsibilities were added.

At this stage, Kempower's IT issues still went through Kemppi Group IT. The company's growth presented many challenges in terms of equipment availability and schedules.

I was responsible for ensuring that all new employees had their equipment ready on their first day of work. This primarily included a laptop and a telephone.

Various IT supplies also went through us. Monitors, mice, keyboards, etc.

Through my own interest I got involved in many things and in this way I learned more and increased my own professional skills.

Local support tasks gradually started to pass from me to others and I started to focus more on ongoing projects.

A little over a year ago we announced in our intranet "Erik Hacklin has been appointed ICT Cloud Specialist.." What changed, what are your responsibilities now?

My current responsibilities include cloud development, which I do with a partner. We are migrating existing data centre resources to Microsoft Azure cloud service.
This includes the servers where almost all systems and services used by Kemppi run.

I'm still providing support for cases that require more *insight or clarification.

The saying, "once a local support, always a local support" seems to hold true and I am still contacted when problems arise, even though they are no longer directly related to my job.

I am happy to help as much as I can from my other tasks. 🙂

In the end, well-run IT operations are all about customer service, and I have received a lot of positive feedback from employees about this. To top it all off, I received the 2022 Kemppiäinen* award, which decorates the wall of my home office. 😉

What do you think have always helped you to take the next step in your career?

1. Even though I had been able to do a variety of production jobs, I started to crave a change.

2. Talking to the right people. My contacts with IT and my conversations with the HR director at the time confirmed my own view and encouraged me to move on.

3. The biggest thing for taking my own career step was the opportunity Jani Kaukiainen gave me to show what I could do. The situation in IT at the time was very challenging and my move was fraught with many risks. Despite these, Jani was willing to give me a chance. For this I am forever grateful to him. 🙂



*The "Kemppiäinen" award is given to a hard-working and outstanding Kemppi employee, nominated by the employees in an annual survey. The winner is chosen by a jury of staff and employer representatives.