Engineering department expands and Oskar Baldyga is the new service manager

What do you do when you have a really good service manager who tells you he is ready to take on something new? You make sure that he has an opportunity to develop within your company, because you can’t let a star like him just walk away. Rick de Feijter joined the engineering department as an additional project engineer, with effect from 1 March. “I had a great job, but I had known how to do it all inside out for some time now, and wanted to progress. I’m attracted to the design area because I can put my creativity to good use there. Because I have managed the service department for years, I know in depth exactly what our customers want and with the team I can enjoy translating that into working solutions.”
Before moving on Rick first carefully trained his successor in the job. Oskar Baldyga joined FoodeQ in June 2021 and actually started as a fitter. “But he made it clear from the start that he was ambitious,” Marinus de Bruijn remembers clearly. “First get some experience in the field, and then move up towards engineering.” It worked out a bit differently, because Rick’s job became available, and Oskar seized this unique opportunity with both hands. “It’s been a rollercoaster,” laughs Oskar. “In the third year of my mechanical engineering degree I did an internship here, and then did some vacation work as well. It was obvious to me that I was in the right place for me here at FoodeQ, so I knocked on the door when I finished my studies. I had hardly time to come on board before I found myself in Uzbekistan fixing a machine failure there. That is pretty different to sitting in a lecture hall, and now I get to work as service manager. Travel is one of the interesting bits of the job. I do like going to customer sites and I like working hands-on. As a fitter you need to be inventive and infinitely adaptable, and work out solutions on your feet, and the same is true in my new role.” The service department is going to be extended with some more fitters, and these jobs are already being advertised. “The fact that I can head up the department when I am barely 23 years old is something I feel is an enormous token of trust. I am the first point of contact for customers for any service-related issues, I schedule the people and if necessary, I get involved myself. This job was designed for me: organising but still working in engineering.”