Intervju med Jennifer Marecki
Program: Master's Program in Business Development and Internationalization
Start of education: 2014
Title: Siemens Graduate Program
Company:
Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy
Nationality:
German
Country of residence:
Denmark/United Kingdom/. In the Siemens Graduate Program we rotate three times. Currently, I am in my first rotation in Denmark. My second rotation will be in UK with starting date June 2017.
A few words about your career / Where you started after graduation and how your career has progressed:
After graduation I started in the Siemens Graduate Program (SGP), which is an intensive and internationally oriented two-year program that prepares fresh talents for future leadership tasks, offering both flexibility and diverse work experiences. The program consists of three challenging eight-month assignments, during which I will gain familiarity with three functional areas in the Renewable Energy sector, while taking on various responsibilities and project work in assignments in the home country and abroad.
My first rotation of the Siemens Graduate Program has been in the Service Business Improvement department, which is split into two teams: Business Process Excellence and Project & Productivity Management. I am in the Business Process Excellence team in which I work with Business Process Management as well as Continuous Improvement. In more detail, I am a Junior Internal Project Manager and I manage and improve processes within the business by applying lean six sigma methodology.
Soon I am starting my second rotation, which will be within Customer Services in the Service Operations department as I wanted to move from back-office to front-office. In more detail, I will be doing Offshore Site Management, which means that I will be managing an Offshore Wind Farm with all its daily challenges. I will be working partially in the office and partially on Site (so on a Vessel on the Sea). Even though I am not an engineer, I decided for this rotation in order to understand the operational service business a bit better and to be closer to the customer.
My third rotation is still to be decided, particularly due to the fact that we are in the middle of a merger. However, I know for sure that I want to look into the Strategy & Business Development department in order to finally do what I am passionate about and what my Master’s degree specialization was all about. I hope I can bring in valuable knowledge from my first and second rotation and I am looking forward to exciting merger-related projects.
Let’s see what comes after the two years…
A few words about your daily work tasks and responsibilities:
Due to the three rotations, my daily work tasks and responsibilities vary. My first rotation has dealt around managing two internal projects with the main purpose to make our business “lean”. This included all steps of project management, starting from initiation phase to execution phase, just with the difference that my customers were internal (so other departments).
My tasks included project scoping, project planning, data collection (surveys, interviews, workshops), data analysis, improving and designing processes, requirements engineering for IT projects, stakeholder communication, change management, cultural management, creating business cases and much more.
As you can read, research methodology courses are of high value for your future career…at least if you work with Business Improvement. ;)
My work tasks and responsibilities will probably look differently for Offshore Site Management, where I will deal less with projects and more with daily challenges. My tasks will include stakeholder management, site controlling and reporting, managing service campaigns, supporting decision-making, supporting in leading technicians, and much more. All work tasks and responsibilities have started with supporting managers and over the time I have gotten more and more responsibility.
Any advice you would like give to current students:
Follow your dreams and never give up, but also be flexible and open. What I mean is that we quite often plan and are stubborn to follow this plan and only this plan. However, this is not how life works. If you want to nail a job immediately after graduation, then be flexible to apply in more than just one specific location and be open to discover industries and companies that are maybe not your preference but still great opportunities. It is about to getting started and show that you can deliver. Once you have managed this step, more doors will open and you are more and more free to choose options that are close to your actual plan. Grab every opportunity and do not be afraid of changes. Also remember that applying for jobs means both positive answers and negative answers, and mostly negative answers outweigh the positive ones. However, this does not mean that you are not good enough, but it may have many other reasons. The biggest reason I have always seen is that something else is waiting for you. So, please never start doubting about yourself and your competencies and skills, but keep going! Also do not expect that you will immediately get high responsibility when starting your first job. Everything comes with experience in life. In the beginning you will rather support other (project) managers, which you should appreciate as you will learn a lot from them. With time then, they will hand over more and more responsibility to you.
And once you got started, I advise you to be determined, to work hard, to make and impact, and to network a lot! That’s at least the advice that I got from my managers…