From the road to Oman straight to Etteplan

There are moments in life when a person needs a break and a change. Rafał Grudzień has been there. He needed a pause and some room to breathe. So he got on his motorcycle and rode 20,000 kilometers. He crossed the Balkans, Jordan and Oman, and at the end of that road was… Etteplan.

Rafał Grudzień, now a Documentation Specialist, is a mechanical engineer by training. He started as a service engineer, then wrote technical documentation at a few different companies. At some point he did what many people only talk about: he dropped everything and left. Not for a month, but for a year and a half.

On a Honda Transalp, he set off from Wrocław for Oman. The route took him through the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. "Sometimes I rode through the desert, and sometimes through rivers where the water almost reached my mirrors," he recalls. He slept in a tent almost the whole time. What he remembers most is the hospitality of the people he met. Each new border was a culture shock, and locals kept inviting him for dinner or offering a place to stay. As he puts it, it can't be compared to any vacation. He came back from the trip with a clear head, ready for the next stage.

Toward the end of his break, Rafał returned to Poland, but he had no plans yet. Then an old colleague from his previous jobs, who worked at Etteplan, stepped in. Every few weeks he would say: "Come over, it's great here." Rafał knew him well enough to know the recommendation was sincere. Winter came, and he felt he needed new tasks and room to grow. After his friend's recommendation, he went through the interview at Etteplan, and two weeks later he started work.

Rafał works as a Documentation Specialist. He prepares technical documentation for two global companies in the technical industry: user and workshop manuals, from small tools to large, complex machines.

His favorite is a project that surprised him with its complexity. It requires reading technical drawings, extracting data from them and writing instructions based on that data, so engineering and writing skills are both essential. On top of that comes the responsibility and a scale of machinery he had never worked with before. "This project clearly shows how a technical writer's work combines two very different worlds: the strictly engineering one and the humanistic, writing one. Working where they meet is a challenge I'm going to enjoy," he says.

When Rafał learned that Etteplan is a corporation, he worried he would run into yet another set of rigid rules. He was pleasantly surprised. "I didn't believe my friend when he said that a corporation can be great. But he was right. The people on the team are friendly and focused on helping each other, not on a rat race," he says. Everyone has their own projects and tasks, yet in team meetings people can share observations and support one another. Colleagues in the same profession don't work for the same client, so it's easy to ask how someone approached a problem and get a different perspective.

Both in his private life and at work, Rafał likes to break the mold. His unconventional journey showed it. At work, too, he looks at projects more broadly and from different angles. That's why he sees one of Etteplan's values, Bold Thinking, as his own. "Just because someone does something a certain way doesn't mean it's the best way," he says.

Rafał wants to keep working on his current projects, and if something new comes up, he'll gladly take on the challenge. He knows that at Etteplan, all it takes is to say so.