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04.03.2024

Three questions for Sylwia Koj

Sylwia Koj was appointed Vice President at IAV Poland on January 1, 2024 and will continue to lead the national company together with Simon Heine, President of IAV Poland. She has been involved in the development from the very beginning and has contributed significantly to its success and rapid growth. Sylwia has just been nominated for the Golden Laurel of the Opole Chamber of Industry, an award for skills and expertise. Here she answers three questions.

Jörg Astalosch (CEO at IAV), Ralf Minow (Senior Manager Global Operations), Sylwia Koj (Vice President IAV Poland), Arkadiusz Wiśniewski (Mayor of Opole), Simon Heine (President IAV Poland) and Mateusz Koźliński (IT IAV Poland) at the opening of the new office in Opole.

What specific goals do you have for your new role and how do you plan to achieve them?

My aim is to turn IAV Poland into a development service provider, just like GmbH in Berlin. It is also important to me to define and deepen our technical focus areas. In order to further develop the organization, I want to make IAV Poland even more attractive for employees and firmly anchor the IAV leadership culture. In addition, IAV Poland should become a strong pillar of global value creation - we are becoming increasingly international at IAV and I want to continue to contribute to this with all my strength, especially with my history.

Sylwia, you have been involved in setting up IAV Poland from the very beginning. What were some of the biggest challenges along the way and how did you overcome them?

So far, the biggest challenge for me personally was at the very beginning, when we had to transfer the planning from paper to the real world: the uncertainty of the first job interviews, the new colleagues' first days at work - and then the onboarding into the projects.

«However, I very quickly realized that we had found the right market in Poland, with many excellently trained and very proactive people. I learned that transparency, clear communication of expectations and open and honest dealings with each other are the key to success.»

Sylwia Koj — Vice President at IAV Poland 

What are the most important steps to achieve the ambitious growth plans for IAV Poland in 2024 and to double the workforce?

We have defined four areas of work for IAV Poland that we are working on very intensively this year. One of these is focusing on our competence clusters, which we want to offer as a service not only to our parent company in Germany, but also to local customers in Poland.