Employee spotlight on Christian

For Christian no two days are quite the same. Working mainly with traffic signals and, increasingly, SWARCO’s smart systems, his role as a Project Manager combines planning, coordination, customer contact and plenty of problem-solving.

A typical morning starts with coffee and breakfast, often followed by a check-in with technicians and colleagues. Before heading into planning, finances and documentation, he makes sure everyone going out to a site has the right information and materials.

Although he does not have direct personnel responsibility, he takes responsibility for coordinating the work and making sure it is carried out safely.

What does he enjoy most? Simply put: solving problems.

For him, the satisfying part is getting a project from start to finish with everything working smoothly – the customer is happy, the technicians have what they need, and the project is delivered as planned. He also prefers having several projects running at the same time. Too little happening can quickly become boring.

His latest challenge is a newly assigned project at Slussen in Stockholm. It is a new area for him, involving signs, barriers and their control systems, as well as new suppliers and a different way of working. The project is also security-classified, which brings additional requirements and challenges.

Rather than seeing the unfamiliar as a problem, he sees it as an opportunity to learn.

“That’s what I like about challenges – learning new things,” he says.

After more than four years at SWARCO, he has also learned something important about himself: changing from the construction industry into the more specialised traffic and ITS sector taught him to be more comfortable asking questions and seeking support.

“I’ve become humbler about the fact that there are many people who know more than I do.”

That is also his advice to anyone starting at SWARCO: be interested and ask a lot of questions. There is a huge amount of knowledge within the company, but you have to be curious enough to find it.

There is also a side of his work that colleagues may not know about. He is involved in the development of blue-light priority within Smart Priority. In Jönköping, the team is implementing the solution and developing privacy filters so that information about emergency vehicles is only visible to users with the appropriate permissions.

It is one example of how his project work extends beyond the more familiar traffic signal installations.

Away from work, mountain biking is his main passion. He rides regularly around Nacka nature reserve, often together with family and friends. His daughter rides too, and they hit the trails together twice a week.

For him, it is the perfect way to switch off.

“It’s difficult to think about project margins when you’re riding down a mountainside.”

And perhaps that says something about what drives him both at work and outside it: a mix of curiosity, challenge, planning – and the occasional need to simply enjoy the ride.

At 22, he travelled to Slovenia on a whim. After meeting a Slovenian couple in Belgium, he accepted their invitation to visit their village. A month later, he packed a backpack and travelled there without knowing where he would stay. He ended up spending around ten days travelling around Slovenia and even staying in the man’s old childhood bedroom – complete with In Flames posters.