When Elin Kvamme finished secondary school in 2008, she started a summer job at Lerøy Smögen with one goal: to save some money while she worked out what she really wanted to do with her life.
“I worked in the section that made shellfish salads; that’s where my journey at Lerøy began”, she explains.
Although the job was only supposed to be for that summer, she enjoyed working at Lerøy so much that as the end of summer approached, she made no plans to leave.
“It was all my colleagues who made it so enjoyable, they were a great gang to work with”, says Elin.
Her colleagues were people with different backgrounds and of different ages, but they worked as a team and the one thing they all had in common was a competitive spirit. If another section had beaten a record, Elin’s section wanted to beat it. Her skill and dedication meant that she was gradually given more responsibility, and relatively soon she had worked her way up to being a team leader at the section.
Because she enjoyed her day-to-day work, she also stayed in this job longer than she had planned. However, eventually her desire to carry on developing became so strong that she could no longer ignore it.
In 2011 Elin took the plunge and applied to the IHM Business School in Gothenburg. The course she took included a 4-month placement as an intern at a business.
“I knew that I wanted to carry on working at Lerøy, and the course felt like an investment in myself. I thought it would allow me to use more of my skills to carry out other tasks at the company.”
It was therefore easy to decide where she wanted to be an intern, and she even received assistance from Mikael Holm, the Managing Director of Lerøy Sverige. He helped her both to get contacts at Lerøy’s head office and to find a flat in Bergen for the time she would be there. Young and talented, Elin came to Bergen from Smögen as one of Lerøy’s very first crop of interns. As an intern, she assisted with logistics and selling to European markets.
“Elin was quick to learn and gained insight into international trade and logistics”, says Carmel Egenberg, who was a team leader for Central Europe when Elin was an intern.
The internship was Elin’s first encounter with sales.
“I learned a huge amount, and I remember thinking in beginning, oh wow, I’ll never learn this. But then the pieces of the puzzle come together and you understand the whole value chain. It was real learning experience! At Lerøy, I felt that I was looked after well”, she says.
After finishing her course, she wanted to return to Lerøy Smögen in order to develop as a salesperson, but there were no vacancies that were relevant to her training. When she was offered a relevant job by a competitor, she chose to accept it. However, that was not the end of Elin’s journey at Lerøy.
Eight years later she received a phone call from Lerøy Smögen. They told her they had thought about her for several other jobs, but now they just had to get in touch. The vacant position was as an export and product line manager at Lerøy Smögen. Elin thought the job sounded interesting, so she applied and ended up getting the job. When she started the new job, she was surprised to see how many of the same faces had stayed at the company since she worked at the factory. Colleagues she had worked with in production were now working in the office.
“It’s really cool that you can work your way up from production and with training get jobs that would normally require a formal education. I’m proud of that!”
She believes it says a lot about the good atmosphere at Lerøy that staff choose to stay for so many years. For her own part, she has no regrets about taking a job at another company, and she is proud of her journey, but she is really pleased to be back at Lerøy again.
“I’ve always had a soft spot for Lerøy”, she says with a smile.
