| Division: | BYK |
| Company: | BYK-Chemie GmbH |
| Role: | IT Management Assistant Apprentice |
| Location: | Wesel |
| Country: | Germany |
| Has been with the company since: | 08/2009 |
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Please describe your apprenticeship as IT management assistant at BYK-Chemie
I have been doing internships in the BYK-Chemie IT department ever since 9th grade. This strengthened my desire for an apprenticeship with this company. In August 2009 I started my IT management assistant apprenticeship. Already during my internships, I noticed that training and continuing education has a very high priority at BYK-Chemie. After having completed my apprenticeship, this insight has been confirmed by the fact that there were always new, interesting tasks and the opportunity to work autonomously. The instructors and the colleagues in the department were always willing to answer questions and were very generous with their time. BYK-Chemie also strongly promotes cohesion among the apprentices. In 2009, even before the apprenticeship started, all the apprentices and instructors met for a joint cooking party to get to know one another and alleviate the nervousness associated with the first day of work.
What did you enjoy most about your apprenticeship?
A lot of independent work and the opportunity to work with others on projects, enabled me to have a diversified apprenticeship. So as an IT management assistant, I was not only able to learn the IT processes but also the business processes in the HR, Accounting, Controlling, Purchasing and Customer Service departments. This created a good foundation that a person can build on.
In addition, the apprenticeship was accompanied by vocational training. For the IT management assistants, the vocational schooling takes place in the form of block sessions, which are divided into three to four blocks per year with five to six weeks of schooling in each block. The nice thing about this is that both parts of the apprenticeship (company training and vocational school) are not repetitive in their content, but rather complement each other. Such that a person can incorporate what they have learned in school into their company training.
Could you provide us with some advices for an Interview?
In-depth preparation for such an interview is very important. It is not only necessary to prepare in terms of information about the company, but you should ask yourself the typical questions about you as an individual (strengths, weaknesses, interests, etc.). First, this is very helpful so you are not surprised by these questions in an interview and already have an idea of how you will answer the question. It is precisely these questions that can provide the interviewer with a lot of information about your personality.
And second, it can also be very interesting for personal reasons to know where your own strengths, weakness etc actually lie. Sometimes you might not even be aware of something yourself.
What do you do in your free time?
Since a person tends to sit most of the time while at work, I need to compensate for that in my free time. I accomplish this best in evening with my friends in the fitness studio or jogging alone. At the end of 2010, I participated for the first time in a large running event in Duisburg. A BYK-Chemie colleague actually sparked my interest because he and many other colleagues also ran in the event. I am also participating in events in Duisburg in the months of January, February and March 2011, and, of course, "BYKlinge" will be there this time as well.
In my free time I am also interested in the latest, constantly changing, increasing more complex technology of the IT and multimedia environment. Last but not least, there are the activities with friends on the weekends and on vacation, which give me the necessary balance.