“Guest workers” from Finland: it’s not the looks, it’s the spirit!

At the Helsinki sports complex, the maintenance coordinator is a woman. An unusual job for a woman, even in this day and age? Not in the least for Heidi Solomon - quite the reverse: The position of maintenance coordinator for sports facilities is an entirely new role in the city of Helsinki, and she is the first person to occupy it. Having studied sports facility maintenance, and is now responsible for 20 employees in five large and three smaller sports parks. And that’s not all: For this past year, she has been studying at the Humak University of Applied Sciences.

“I guess they needed somebody who was crazy enough to break new ground, so they offered me the job. Safety is of great importance to me, and I wanted to develop my own means and methods of training people to use different types of machinery and to carry out the maintenance of our facilities,” says Heidi.

Heidi’s career path is no less extraordinary than her career itself:

“I worked in the restaurant business for 14 years, after which I ran my own company as a makeup artist. When I became a mother to my little princess, I had to rethink lifetime job options which would be better for me as a mother, and allow me to build a career where I can continue to learn something new. I like a challenge, so I applied to the college for sports facility management. At that time, I was the 6th woman from Helsinki to graduate from this school. As sports facilities maintenance manager, I was responsible for the maintenance of football pitches in summer and ice rinks in winter, and that was when I first encountered ice and ice-rink machinery. It was love at first sight!” says Heidi.

“How did the idea of coming to WM ice technics to build ice resurfacing machinery yourselves come about?” I ask curiously.

“That’s easy to answer: it’s not the looks, it’s the spirit of your ice resurfacers. And what could be a better way of teaching our mechanics about ice resurfacing machinery than to build one themselves? Our team feels very much at ease with you. I love the atmosphere, and everybody is very hard-working and nice to one another. A big ‘thank you’ to WM ice technics for this “Gentleman’s Disneyland experience!” says Heidi Solomon, Ylläpitokoordinaattori – Maintenance Coordinator.