Head of Training Solutions

Keeping skills from expiring. Oya is making it real
When Oya Torum joined Elopak as Head of Training Solutions in August 2025, she brought over ten years of experience in learning and development and a clear conviction: great training starts with the learner in mind. To transfer knowledge and help people grow, training must be designed as an experience where people can actually absorb and apply what they learn.
‑ When you have a lot of expertise, you have to translate that knowledge in a way that people can benefit from it. To do that, you have to put the learner rather than the content at the center.
Oya leads a team of seven full‑time trainers and a coordinator. Their primary audience is Elopak's field service engineers – the people who maintain and troubleshoot filling machines at customer sites around the world – as well as their customers' operators and technicians working with the machines on‑site.
Field service engineers are Elopak's eyes and ears at the customer. Whenever a machine needs to be maintained or fixed, they are the ones on‑site. That means the skills they need go well beyond knowing the machinery.
‑ Field service engineers represent Elopak and are in daily contact with customers. They need to be equipped not only with technical skills, but also with soft skills to support our customers effectively.
To ensure engineers can develop these competencies, Elopak has invested in its first dedicated training machine in Mönchengladbach. It is the first step of what Oya envisions as a network of training hubs, allowing hands‑on learning to happen closer to where engineers and customers actually are.
To further expand capacity, Oya has introduced a framework for regional trainers: field service engineers who take on training responsibilities part‑time. This enables training delivery in local markets and in the local language.
Another foundation of Oya's vision has been to develop the training methodology itself. To do that, she has launched an 18‑month trainer qualification program aimed at developing technical trainers into professional facilitators.
‑ Our trainers are subject matter experts. My goal is to help them step out of their comfort zone and become facilitators who design meaningful learning experiences.
Together with her team, Oya spends a lot of time thinking about how to evolve training formats to align with how people actually learn today.
‑ When a washing machine breaks at home, no one reads the instruction manual anymore. People today expect learning to be accessible, immediate, and practical – not a thick manual. Our training needs to take that into account and evolve. For technical roles, I believe in blended learning, where you combine hands‑on instructor‑led courses with focused digital content that supports learning in the flow of work..
Digitalization is not only changing on how people learn, it fundamentally reshapes skills required in many roles.
‑ Some of the things I listed on my resume when I started my career are no longer relevant today. Skills have an expiry date. That’s why companies need to plan for continuous upskilling and reskilling. Learning and development have never been more important.
For Elopak, this challenge comes with an advantage: people tend to stay for a long time. For Oya, that creates an opportunity.
‑ When people stay, knowledge stays with them. My role is to make sure that knowledge is captured, shared, and scaled so the whole company benefits.
The possibility to make a real difference is in your hands