Meeting the love of her life in Finland brought Aurelia’s test engineer Oxana Saloshina to Lappeenranta, but it was her passion for work that drove her to search for work at Aurelia Turbines.
“My engineering career started in a big multinational company. I grew quickly to maintenance and commissioning engineer there, and I was their first female field service engineer in the world”, Saloshina says.
When she moved to Finland, she first became a specialist in MES, a manufacturing execution system. Saloshina worked as a back-end specialist with SQL databases and sometimes wrote JavaScript for the systems’ database.
“However, already in my first job, gas turbines became my passion. I started to follow Aurelia Turbines and in 2021, I finally got a chance to work here”, Saloshina says.
Careers can advance both horizontally and vertically, and at Aurelia, Saloshina has had a chance to try both team-leading and expert work.
“I have learned that my passion is to develop my career horizontally. Like a true professional, I want to be this person who knows as much as I can and who can do as much as I can”, she explains.
“It is important to discuss properly with your bosses about what you really want. They make their best to accommodate the way the work is organised when they know your goals and they are given time to make their plans.”
Saloshina likes the teamwork at Aurelia.
“People feel quite close professionally to each other because Aurelia is a small company. People are not formal. Everyone knows a bit of this and that from different areas of our work. It is quite special because you can go to the electrical engineer and ask them something about testing or you can go to some mechanical engineer and he knows something about commissioning”, Saloshina tells.
Family is a priority to Saloshina, and at Aurelia, she can both invest her time in her family and advance her career. She is having her first child later this year. Now, with the delivery date approaching, she has begun working part-time.
“I spoke again to my supervisor about this. We are all smart people here, very understandable and understanding ones. It was possible to make these arrangements”, Saloshina explains.
After her parental leave, she will return to work with gas turbines.
“Me and my husband have already found a nice day care place to which we want to take our child for working days”, Saloshina says.
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is part of the Finnish education system. All children under school age are entitled to ECEC even if one or both parents are at home. The ECEC fee is heavily subsidised by the authorities, and there are also many paid parental leave options. The school system is considered one of the best in the world.
Saloshina also praises Finland’s healthcare system.
“For example, we have those health care appointments now every few weeks and almost all of them are basically for free. You do not really think how you could afford this. You can bring baby to the world safely.”