You’ve been with the company for many years – what makes you stay?

What keeps me here at Canon Production Printing is that over the years I have had many different jobs and assignments. When I joined the company in 2007 after an internship, I started as a designer. Now I’m a mechanical lead engineer. I have had the opportunity to work on so many different types of units and products that I’ve really changed my job every two years! It’s continuously different, and that’s what I really like about my job.

So what does your day-to-day job involve?

The actual work varies depending on the project phase. We work in multidisciplinary teams with electrical engineers and software engineers, so it’s important to keep each other informed what we’re doing. At the start, we do a lot of designing, and towards the end we’re building the prototype from parts and verifying whether we have met requirements. I get to follow a project through to completion. It’s not only theoretical work – it’s also taking it into practice. I am involved at every stage.

What do you like best about working at CPP?

It’s hard to pick out one thing because there are so many to choose from. I have great colleagues. The working environment is fantastic. We have a flat organizational structure, and I am responsible for my own work and for my own unit. Management expects you to take responsibility even as a graduate employee straight out of university. You can make a real impact.

Can you tell us something you’re particularly proud of?

In R&D, alongside our work as engineers developing products for the company, we also try to improve knowledge within our mechanical engineering department. I’m part of the Computer-Aided Engineering group to develop model-based design methods that help us pinpoint design issues before we have physical prototypes. I’ve helped to introduce this way of working into our department. This is something I’m really proud of, because all our mechanical engineers now work with this tooling in their daily work.

What’s been the best day ever?

The real highlight days are of course the day that a product is released. If you’ve been working for several years on a product, and then it’s released, and the production line is running – it’s a great feeling!