PowerON Group welcomes new staff and interns in first virtual “All Staff Forum”

PowerON has been intercontinental since day one, with teams in Dresden, Germany and Auckland, New Zealand. While this keeps us close to customers in Europe, the split brings several challenges. The time shift of 10-12 hours between Germany and New Zealand means extra planning is needed for the cross-team meetings that are vital for a young company exploiting ground-breaking technology. With the PowerON team growing rapidly just now, getting together is vital as we build links throughout the team.

Recently PowerON held its first “All Staff Forum”, where several new team members and interns were introduced and welcomed. “Even though it is not possible to physically meet just now, with Covid restrictions still in place, we need to do what we can for our team members to link up. PowerON’s success is based on ideas coming out of our multi-disciplinary team, which is why we can offer new solutions to support our customers”, Ross Green, COO, said after the meeting, “Our team gets a real lift from learning a little more about their colleagues, the available skill base and the full range of projects throughout our company. We will have such events at quarterly from now on.”

“After raising significant capital earlier this year, we have extended our team with numerous brilliant minds. It is important that our new people get to know the entire team, no matter where they are located” says Markus Henke, PowerON CEO. “Both of our branches have added engineering staff to support execution of our near- and longer-term technical plans. We are in process hiring a Chief Commercial Officer in Germany to shape and drive our medium-term business development”, added Dr. Henke. 

Katie Wilson, CTO, noted: “We have an ambitious technical programme for delivery in 2022 to improve our product and service offers, supporting our current and prospective customers as they look to deploy our active elastomer components. The scale of opportunity for our customers is large, and PowerON is conscious of the need to support customers through the transition away from legacy electronic and electromechanical systems.” Dr. Wilson added: “Our strategic new hires have the right background and know how to develop smart elastic material applications meeting identified customer needs.”

Dr. Henke commented that PowerON expects to complete the current hiring round mid-2022. “We’re pleased with the response we received from candidates, especially given the competitive recruitment situation for good people in Europe and New Zealand now. We are running ahead of our recruitment goals, meaning that we will have the team ready with increased capacity for customer support next year.” He added that: “So far we have people of seven different nationalities. We are truly an international company and it is good to see the collaborative working across the team. This recruitment round has also seen us make good progress towards meeting our diversity goals. Diversity & inclusiveness are the top goals for companies, like PowerON, that build on new ideas.”