“They let me go abroad as an apprentice – that was really cool”
LEONI turning 100: Contemporary witness Alicia Zwick on video about “colleagues”
During her training to qualify as an industrial business manager at Leoni, Alicia Zwick has not only been acquiring trade-specific knowledge, but has also been learning how to work creatively, make decisions independently and especially also how to take on personal responsibility. At the Company’s facility in Roth, this knowledge is conveyed by way of an in-house ‘junior company’. “The Leoni Junior Group is a company within the company that is managed by apprentices; so it’s our own company,” Zwick, who was fulfilling the role of managing director in 2016, explains.
In this way apprentices learn at an early stage about processes that are very similar to those of a real company – like, for instance, setting the targets for the financial year, putting products and services on the market within the company as well as manufacturing special products and exhibits for trade fairs and marketing purposes, such as the cable pipe: “This is presentation material for use particularly in product management or in sales at trade fairs to make the individual stages visible – from the wire, which is supplied in an eight-millimetre gauge, through to the cable.”
The apprentice at Leoni also highlighted the additional opportunities, such as the option of doing an internship at a location outside Germany. “I was in Hatvan, Hungary, where I worked in customer services and that was really cool,” Zwick recounts. There she learned to communicate with colleagues in English to be able to perform her new tasks. “After one and a half weeks I was then fully involved in the day-to-day routine. That was great and I’m also very thankful that I had the opportunity to do this internship outside Germany.”
Yet Leoni also offers young people embarking on their careers in Roth plenty beyond the normal syllabus. “They run campaigns like the Health Week, which I think is really good. And generally, too, I think that colleagues look after each other a lot at Leoni,” Zwick says.
Preview: The fifth and final contemporary witness video will be released in November. Bernd Käfer, who works in the development department of Leoni’s Wiring Systems Division in Kitzingen, talks about “innovation”.