I’m originally from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany and went on to work for a company and study my BSc in Business Science and Management at “Nordakademie University of Applied Science”. As part of the education I spent a semester abroad in California studying finance and economics related electives. This was an amazing experience that really broadened my horizon and inspired me to travel more in order to explore different cultures.
➔ Hiring! Danfoss are looking for graduates right now. Have a look here for more details about their graduate programme.
I’m originally from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany and I ended up doing my MSc in Global Logistics and Supply Chain Management at SDU in Odense. It’s kind of a funny story that the reason I ended up applying for SDU was due to having lived with 3 Swedish guys during the exchange in California that put Scandinavia on my map. I really liked the way scandinavian countries are leading when it comes to digitalisation and the concept of problem oriented learning.
Alongside my studies at SDU, I’ve been involved in the Universitys’ talent programme in Entrepreneurship & Innovation and the local startup environment in Odense.
What attracted you to the company and their graduate programme?
When I was looking for the best way to start my career, I had 3 main criteria in mind:
I have been very surprised by the amount of responsibility given very early on. People place a lot of trust in us graduates. At the same time, there are high expectations as the program has been around for over 30 years. Former graduates had great careers in the company and are generally perceived as being really bright minds.
What does a typical day look like?
It really depends on your project, but what surely holds at any given day is that you will learn something new and your day will be different from the one before. My projects have all been very much cross-functional and about finding the best solution for a problem, so it really was on me to figure out how to get this done the best way possible together with a number of stakeholders. In the beginning of projects they key is to really understand the root cause for the problem you are trying to solve. You really become the expert in this topic and most often this involves a lot of conversations and meetings with individuals across the entire organization, which are often located in different parts of the world. You really acquire a lot of information over a short period of time and build a large network. Once you understand the problem and what it takes to solve it, it’s about making your solution fit to the organization and managing the numerous stakeholders involved.
What has been the most exciting project you have worked on so far?
I really enjoy the project I’m currently working on. It’s quite technical but without going into too much detail, it is about planning the capital expenditures for ramping up our global supply chain as we are currently launching a new portfolio of frequency converters globally. My task is to further develop our supply chain strategies top down and create business cases bottom up on how to ensure that over the course of the global launch, our supply chain can satisfy customer needs efficiently. Here we also have to consider a very trending topic in supply chain management at the moment, which is how to minimize the impact of random disruptions such as COVID.19 on our ability to produce and deliver products to our customers.
What has been the biggest challenge as a graduate?
You need to be ready to take responsibility for your own journey as a graduate. Danfoss is a huge company and especially in the beginning it can be a bit overwhelming with all the new impressions and information coming at you. I would highly recommend that you spend quite some time thinking about what you want to get out of your time as a graduate and how you want to develop -both before and during the program. What rotations you want to do and what projects you want to work on is on you. Danfoss is very flexible and can give you all the options, but you need to drive it.
Thankfully, you are not completely on your own. Danfoss is great at supporting us graduates, so if you ever have any challenges, your mentor, your project owner or your global graduate-buddy are there to help you figure it out.
What has been a thing that has surprised you most about the programme (something you didn’t expect prior to starting)?
I have been very surprised by the amount of responsibility given very early on. People place a lot of trust in us graduates. At the same time, there are high expectations as the program has been around for over 30 years. Former graduates had great careers in the company and are generally perceived as being really bright minds.
So, you can definitely feel that there are high expectations when you enter as a graduate in Danfoss, but that also means that you get to work on very relevant projects and challenge yourself, which really pushes you and spurs your own development.
Did you apply for multiple programmes?
Yes I did.
Fun fact about yourself?
In my spare time I’m restoring an old Volkswagen van that I’m using for surf trips to the west coast of Jutland. Normally I work with innovative products and state of the art technologies at Danfoss but this VW is quite the opposite and very old school.
➔ Hiring! Danfoss are looking for graduates right now. Have a look here for more details about their graduate programme.
