New | Swire's trainer of top executives has been there and done that

Tomas Bay was formerly boss of a multinational firm, which is probably why he could get into a programme to train other senior executives for the Swire Group.

A father of two daughters, Bay is the principal consultant at Ethos International, an in-house organisation Swire uses to train team leaders, department heads and other senior executives of the companies under the group. Next year, it will expand the programme to provide training for chief executives.

Bay has the singular advantage of having many years of experience as a team leader and head of operations. This helps him understand the problems of the job and the training needed by senior executives.

"I always wanted to be a teacher as I love training and sharing knowledge with others," he said in an interview at the Ethos office in Quarry Bay.

Bay was born in Denmark and began his career working for international shipping and oil giant A.P.Moller - Maersk. He rose to become the managing director of Maersk Logistics HK in 1999, running the business and its staff of 700 people in southern China.

While Bay enjoyed his job at Maersk very much, his initial career choice was in fact to be a teacher. And every time he joined a training class at Maersk, he wanted to switch positions with the trainer.