After my general university entrance qualification, I began my bachelor of science in business informatics in the dual system. I was able to gain practical experience at the mentoring company during my study programme – where I was able to gain both information technology and business knowledge. After completing my bachelor’s degree, I was able to expand my professional and practical experience during a long-term internship at Renault.

I also completed a master of science in economics with a focus on innovation and technology management in order to expand my academic horizon. In addition to this, I supported the Digital Customer Management team with technology-oriented corporate consulting. After my study programme, I began my career at one of the big four in the area of technology strategy & architecture advisory where I was able to gain experience with international teams doing assignments at various corporate groups from different industries. The focus of the projects that I managed was on the topics of digital transformation, IT and process management as well as strategy development.

Even before joining hahn,consultants, I was able to gain a wide range of professional experience at multiple consulting companies as well as companies from the industry and integrate this knowledge into my working environment at the time.

Based on the experience that I gained in international/national corporate consulting, I noticed that I am more interested in corporate consulting with a regional focus and medium-sized clients.

I wanted to work in an environment where measures that are created show direct effects and success and do not just remain a “concept on paper”. After searching for consulting agencies in the Düsseldorf area, I found hahn,consultants. h,c offers just what I was looking for: a medium-sized corporate consulting company that not only creates theoretical concepts for clients but also helps clients implement concepts (sometimes for years).

I found the selection process to be very structured and personal. It was very positive for me to get to know all the managing directors during my interviews and to get an impression of the managers and company culture at h,c at an early stage.

My first days at the office in Haan included basic training sessions where I received technical and organisational training about working life at h,c. The sessions are an important fixed component of the onboarding process at h,c. At the same time, I was able to work on three different projects right at the beginning of my employment. This included holding a market workshop about tapping into the Chinese market for our clients.

Since one of the main differences between h,c and “classic” consulting companies is that you normally manage three to five projects at the same time, it can be a challenge sometimes to maintain an overview of all tasks, areas of responsibility and deadlines. I would like to emphasise the word “can” since I personally have a lot of fun with structuring myself as well as projects in general, with dividing them into work packages and partial processes, and successively working through them.
The short-term nature and urgency of restructuring projects makes it necessary for you to be able to quickly learn business areas, process workflows, interdependencies and the development of companies.
Interpersonal aspects are also important as we operate in an environment where we help companies get themselves out of crisis situations quite often. This is usually an unfamiliar stressful situation for our clients. Because of this context, you especially need to be aware of your responsibility and have a lot of empathy and sensitivity when dealing with clients.

Basically, a cross-project highlight for me at h,c, is that the majority of our projects consists of long-term follow-up projects. This leads to the fact that we also become part of the success story and active company development for almost every project and are able to help make companies competitive and profitable again in the long term.
In addition to this “special h,c characteristic”, an important aspect for me is the diversity and variety that a corporate consulting company has.

A personal highlight for me is that I have been able to make contributions to implementing digital transformation of the project work at h,c. This starts with developing the digital transformation strategy as well as the concept for handling the project work via SharePoint including “combatting” technical hurdles and preparing and conducting multiple internal employee training sessions. By introducing SharePoint and Microsoft 365, a lot of processes have been able to be digitally transformed and streamlined, and collaboration has been simplified on internal and external project teams. It is also important for us to internally implement what we do every day for our clients: manage change processes and guide them to success.

In addition to the basic training sessions on fundamental specialist areas as well as h,c-specific tools and processes which were mentioned, an individual training budget is available to every employee at h,c, and it can be used to attend external continuing education sessions. The employees work together with project managers and the management – usually at biannual feedback sessions – to determine which continuing education sessions make sense and are targeted to the employee’s personal development (stage).
In addition to internal and external continuing education sessions, you also naturally become familiar with various specialist areas, ranges of topics and industries and thus continually expand your technical, methodical and social skills on a daily basis because of the ever-changing projects.

The mentor concept is another part of personal promotion at h,c. From the beginning, you receive a mentor who provides you with advice and assistance with all of your concerns on and off the job.

In addition to the enormous wealth of experience and knowledge of my colleagues, the family corporate culture is one of the aspects that distinguishes h,c and makes it special. I noticed this while preparing for my interview when I saw the above-average job tenure of the partners at h,c.
It is definitely normal with a company size of approximately 40 employees that the culture would be different than the culture of a consulting company with several hundred or thousand co-workers. The proximity and personal level that you have at h,c as well as among consultants, partners and managing directors is something that should not be taken for granted in my opinion and cannot be found at all consulting companies.
Personal cohesion at h,c is not only strengthened by regularly recurring in-house events but also by activities together after work. You cannot find the dog-eat-dog mentality at our company.

Managing your work-life balance where you can just “switch off” your brain and “recharge your batteries” is very important in my opinion. I manage my work-life balance by going to fitness and football training multiple times during the week and by meeting with friends on the weekend. We usually have something to eat and drink and party in beautiful Cologne.