Hey, I’m Lara and I’m in the 11th grade at the Robert Bosch Fachoberschule (FOS) in Munich, in the international business branch. I’m doing my practical training at TecAlliance. The practical training is a “school subject” at the FOS that is graded like any other (in the Abitur it counts like the P‑Seminar). The idea behind the “internship” is to get to know as many departments of a company as possible to help us choose a career.
First I was in the controlling team. This helped me to get a general overview of the company and thus made it relatively easy for me to get started. During this time, I also worked in the accounting department so that I could fully grasp the invoice processing process. During this time, I was very grateful that everyone made me feel like I couldn’t ask enough questions. This made me feel welcome from the very beginning.
I spent the second and third phases of my internship with the Marketing and PR department. In the second phase, I spent a lot of time on social media tasks, which was still very German-heavy. In the third phase, in which I completely switched to home office due to the given Corona situation, a variety of tasks were added, mainly on an international level. These two phases taught me an incredible amount about the importance of clear communication, both written and personal. There was also never a lack of fun with the team.
Working at home initially presented me with the challenge of how to structure my working day in a way that I am distracted as little as possible and get as much done as before. Once this had settled in well after about 2–3 days, it no longer made a difference to me whether I worked at home and exchanged ideas with colleagues over Teams or whether I sat in the office. This situation, in which you have to be very flexible, will definitely help me in my future working life.
