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30/04/03 (42 review reads) |
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Advantages: Interesting work placement, Well paid
Disadvantages: Competitive
Or maybe “I know what *I* did the summer before last” – doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?
Siemens. A name we all used to giggle at when we were at school because phonetically at least it had the potential to be rather rude. Or so it seemed when we were 12. It was almost as good as the day we were sent home with letters from primary school saying the company employed to rebuild our school which had just burnt down, was the Condon brothers. But Siemens is more than a company with a silly name. It’s a company that gave me a job last summer and let me live it up in Vienna for a couple of months.
** Application Procedure **
For me it was a case of “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. We have various friends in Austria and one is a fairly high up managerial type at Siemens. He let us know there might be a job for me there and sent me a form. It was a pretty standard one, asking simply for contact details, work experience to date and qualifications achieved. I sent it back and waited for, well, a few months until I got a nice little email saying, yup, you can come and work here. I wasn’t interviewed in any way shape or form, although I think this is only because I was rather far away, being at uni in Manchester when I applied. Some of the other interns I spoke to had been summoned to face to face interviews, others had spoken on the phone. I can’t remember the numbers exactly, but there were something in the region of 3000 applicants for the 200 or so positions available over the summer. Although I was by no means the only foreigner taken on, I was one of the youngest (their lower age limit is 18, but most interns are older) and the only person neither a native nor studying at a German university.
I’m not sure how the Siemens UK scheme works although I know they offer summer placements. For Vienna the application deadline was December for placem
ents starting the following summer. They also offer February placements (the Austrian university systems works on a semester set up, running from September until July, but with a couple of months off just after Christmas)
** My Experience and Views **
I turned up on my first day with a letter saying I should report to my personnel department at 8am sharp. I’d already scoped out the area a few days earlier and knew the campus style complex was huge, so I turned up early to make sure I had time to find my way once inside. It seems the word “your” was a bit misleading. Instead of the quiet little HR dept I was expecting, I was greeted with a huge long queue of interns. It took over an hour to get to the front of the line and then I had an extra 20 mins explaining to them why I didn’t (a) speak perfect German and (b) have an income tax card. Could it be because, hmmmm, I wasn’t Austrian? After that was all sorted out I was on my way through the labyrinth that is Siemens Wien to my new office.
My first few hours were spent learning about the history of the company and of the department itself. There were 2 other new students from our department with me for these “lectures”, the returning ones having learnt it all before. I sat and listened and nodded in the important parts, and generally got by without having to do or say much.
4 hours later I was hard at work…..reading. For the next 3 days all I did was read. Websites and books. Magazines and journals. Research, you see. In English and in German. The term “work experience” as you might think of it in England wouldn’t really apply here. I wasn’t there to make the coffee and do the photocopying – I was there to work. Hard. My “assignment” for the summer was to choose a problem and write a program to solve it, providing the appropriate documentation (in German) along the way. You don't nee
d, and I’m sure don’t want, to know all the details, but let’s just say it involved hyphens. Thrilling, huh? Actually, it was more fun that it sounds. I got to use and improve my knowledge of linguistics, computing and German all at the same time. I had various mentors and colleagues supervising my work and supporting me though my stay, and within days I was known in the company-wide personnel dept at “the British student”. Nice…and a total contrast from here, where every 2nd work placement student comes from the UK.
And so, the summer passed. I worked 4.5 days a week as all the full time employees did. I was at my office bright and early in the morning, and home in time to watch ER (on at teatime rather than in the evenings over there) each night. I got to know all my department and lots of other interns throughout the company. We went for strolls around the grounds in the 30 C sunshine at lunchtime, eating ice creams and nattering, and generally avoiding going back inside to the cool air conditioned offices to do some work.
2 months later I flew back to England older (I turned 19 while I was there), wiser and with a rather nice tan (though it has to be said, this was more from the weekends spent swimming in the Danube than the mini lunchtime excursions). If there was one thing the placement taught me, it was that that’s *not* an area I want to go into when I graduate, but I’d still had a great summer.
Some extra points
· To work for Siemens you need a bank account in the country where you’ll be working. Bear this in mind as in Vienna it took my bank there almost 3 weeks to get my account up and running - luckily I had a month in the city teaching before my placement started, so it was set up in time.
· The pay was good – significantly higher than my friends on placement in the UK. An average student’s salary here was somewhere in the region of
900 Eu
ros
per month. We also got 13th and 14th month pay which I didn’t quite understand but wasn’t going to complain about…. I wasn’t taxed that much but I did pay extortionate amounts of national insurance type contributions. However I was able to claim these back (how I wish you could reclaim NI in the UK!) and got a rather lovely credit in my UK bank account in May last year.
· Although they were happy to employ me as a foreigner, I didn’t get any extra allowances. For all interns who don’t come from Germany, the company I’m currently working for pays not only the flights here and home again, but also an accommodation allowance each month as well as the standard intern salary. At Siemens I got the same pay and conditions as the other (native) interns. Plus you don’t get any holidays if you do a 2 month placement :-( As an employee here on a 12 month contract I get the 30 days all other workers in the firm are entitled to.
· Although we had a non-German speaking employee from the Czech office with us 2 days a week, I do think you’d need to speak the language, especially as an intern. Everyone in my office could speak some English but not enough, for example, to explain to me everything what they wanted me to do. Plus, I had to produce my documentation in German during my stay.
· If you’re working abroad you need to be able to adapt without complaints to new cultures and so on. Being in the office for 7am took some doing at the time, but having every Friday afternoon off was rather lovely.
· I was treated pretty much like the rest of the permanent full time employees, apart from the fact I didn’t get a snazzy @siemens.com email address. The only reason I would have liked one would be for giving cryptic clues to people when they forgot it. The possibilities would have been much more fun than what I’m left with now: “the sticky stuff that comes i
n
trees”.
· Siemens was a nice company to work for. They treated their students well, and it was pretty laid back – all first names, even with managers, everyone in the office in jeans, things like that. Typical for most continental Europe firms, but not that usual for the UK.
I’m happier where I am now, but that’s probably due more to me than the companies involved. I’m older, I’m wiser, and I’m more interested in learning things that will help me with my final year at uni that I was at the time. Siemens was a fine place, and I would recommend it to students with relevant degrees looking for work placements. I have no horror stories to tell, and this, it seems, is unusual as far as work placements are concerned.
(You can't really tell from the path above, but this is posted under a section for work placements abroad, so it's not as obscurely placed as it might appear).
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