Our first resignation from the team came at the end of last year, which made us a little nervous about finding an equally talented replacement. But it turned out that we actually already had the right person in place.
Lolle & Nielsen Inventions is a relatively small team and we’ve had three core employees for a long time. Two have been here for 11 years, while one has been with us for 6 years. But shortly before the beginning of this year, we received a resignation from the latter who had been here for six years – the first resignation we’ve ever had.
With an offer of a higher salary closer to home, his decision made sense to us, but it still shook us up a bit because it’s an entirely new situation for us.
It’s hard to replace a skilled employee who is deeply involved in the projects and very integrated into the company. So we raked our brains for a week, not knowing what to do.
At the same time, our Ambitlocker project has employed a guy named Alex for two years. His job is to assemble the locks, which is technical but also quite manual and routine labour.
Alex is from Switzerland but now lives in Denmark. He’s really into climbing and needed some work so he could afford to climb. We’ve talked a lot about that.
But in the post-termination process, we discuss the fact that he is both practically skilled and really sharp, and he has a great understanding of mechanics. So, what is his educational background, actually?
Gold in the basement
It turns out that Alex is a mechanical engineer: He has a bachelor’s degree in the same thing as the rest of us. He just hasn’t really used it since he finished his studies in Switzerland.
We know he’s good, so we asked him if he wanted a more permanent job. It turns out he’s super interested, but may have been too shy to ask. So the resource we were so frustrated that we didn’t have was in our workshop, assembling locks all the time.
We’ve since had him onboarded for a trial period, and as expected, he fits right in with the team, is very skilled and bright. So now he’s working with crane development – but of course, he still gets to assemble locks.
So the story ended happily. And a little bit stupid.