My plan, when I first moved to Sweden with my new husband, was to study Swedish for six months and then start looking for a job. Best-laid plans, and all that, and my discovery, 2 months after our arrival, that I was pregnant threw them right out the window. I studied Swedish anyway, but only for 4 months, taking an expensive class first at the Folkuniversitet and then, when I moved up to the front of the line, a second class at the free, government-sponsored Swedish for Immigrants. This second class sucked in comparison, but we couldn’t afford to turn it down since I wasn’t working.
Martin was born in early December of that first year and we started trying quite soon after to get pregnant again, as we had decided to get all the baby stuff over with as soon as possible and have our second (and last) child close to the first, so job-hunting went on the back burner. We were lucky in achieving our goal; I was pregnant again with Karin when Martin was 10 months old. By the time she was born, however, I’d been unemployed for nearly 2 years and was slowly going crazy, what with the being home with small kids thing (not to mention pregnancy itself which was not at all my cup of tea, never mind the horror that was breastfeeding).
The AWC was young then, a group of motivated, women with lots of energy and a great dynamic. I was in the midst of meeting and getting to know the women who would become my closest friends here in Sweden: Angie, Emily, Kathey, Kelly and Debbie. It was a great time, full of fun and lots of evenings and activities and dinners together.
When Karin was only 4 months old, Kelly saw an advertisement in the newspaper for an open position at Ericsson. It was for a Marketing Coordinator and she immediately was struck by how exactly right the job sounded for me. She called me up to tell me about it and popped it in the mail to me so that I could check it out (we didn’t, and still don’t, subscribe to the newspaper). I agreed that it DID sound wonderful, but I wasn’t really job-hunting, since I had a new baby and a toddler and because in Sweden, you can’t put a child into the daycare system until they reach their first year birthday.
I got the clipped out job advert the next day and read it through and thought to myself, this is MY job. I couldn’t NOT try for it. It was end of November and if I remember correctly, I actually had my first interview on Thanksgiving Day. I had my second and third interviews shortly after and before Christmas I had been offered the job. Kelly had been right, it WAS my job! There was a bit of a scramble to find a full-time babysitter, so I didn’t actually start until March.
It was a great job, and one that I was remarkably well-suited for, and the company was a good fit, too, until the IT bubble burst and things went sour for a long time. I managed to make it through the cutbacks and layoffs and hard times, but after 4.5 years Ericsson decided that because it wasn’t really their core business, they were going to shut our subsidiary company down completely. The company I worked for was the Bluetooth division of Ericsson (the inventor of the technology, and one of the founders of the Bluetooth SIG). When our company closed, the SIG, made up today of some 10,000 member companies, kept on going. A few of my co-workers moved over to the small European office of the SIG in Malmö, but most of us scattered around the area, many choosing to move to other Ericsson companies or take employment at the then newly merged Sony Ericsson.
Anyway, I was lucky. I got a new job almost immediately at Axis Communications, where I still am today. I thought my job at Ericsson was great, but it was just a starting board for my current position, where I thrive tremendously, despite the crazy amount of work. This fall will be my 4th anniversary at Axis, so I’ve nearly been at this job as long as I was at my first one here in Sweden. A few months ago, one of my former Ericsson colleagues who works for the Bluetooth SIG sent me an email asking me to forward information about an open job position to the AWC. I did so, and heard that a few people I knew had applied. My ex-colleague friend asked me for some references, which I gladly gave.
Kelly got the job. She starts next week and she’s thrilled. Even though I didn’t send it specifically to her, I still feel rather instrumental in the whole thing and it makes me really happy that I was able, in some small way, to return the favor she did me nearly 9 years ago.