Audi: Learning The Ropes in Industry with "First Job Experience"

INGOLSTADT - July 30, 2008: For college graduates with good grades in a largely theoretical major, Audi is now offering a qualification program called “First Job Experience” (FJE). FJE provides an excellent opportunity for automobile aficionados still at the bottom of the career ladder to tackle selected projects over a period of six months to a year, gaining insight into professional life and learning valuable skills.

The program is offered over all corporate business segments and is geared towards interested graduates who, because of their largely theoretical studies, have little practical industry experience. Under the careful tutelage of the respective departments and Human Resources, FJE provides these graduates with a well-grounded insight into AUDI AG’s structures and processes.

Dr Alfred Quenzler, Head of Human Resources Marketing at Audi, explains: “In addition to project work, we focus on providing graduates with the skills they need: individually-tailored seminars, e-learning and lectures given by experts from all our company’s business segments are meant to augment both their professional and interdisciplinary qualifications.”

Julia Arndt (27) was one of the first graduates to take part. She joined the program in February 2007 after completing her studies in Rhetoric, Romance Studies and Educational Sciences. “It’s not easy getting a job in industry with a humanities major. I applied to Audi, which is how I found out about the FJE program.”

For the first six months of the qualification program, Ms Arndt worked in Human Resources Marketing; more specifically in intern support. “I mainly organized introductory and closing events, advised interns over the telephone and created an electronic staff file for the junior staff program.” During the second six-month period, she got to know international human resources management. “My task was to support employees visiting Germany from our overseas locations and also German employees that had been relocated. Organizing a visit by a Chinese delegation of automobile-industry managers was an interesting highlight.”

Dr Götz Borsdorf (30) is another program enthusiastic. “First Job Experience gave me a unique opportunity to follow up a rather general college education with hands-on industry experience. Not only was I able to evaluate my own expectations of how a career in industry might be, I acquired a full understanding of the processes and structures in a large corporation.” Dr Borsdorf was particularly excited about the opportunity to build a comprehensive network of contacts within the company.

Borsdorf studied History, Political Science and Political Economics at Münster University, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on “The Internationalization of German Corporations after the Second World War” at the Faculty of Social and Economic History. He focused his case-studies on the automobile industry. During the FJE program, Dr Borsdorf was assigned to the Marketing Division, where he worked on various tasks and projects for Audi TV as well as for International Customer and Retail Marketing.

Martin Steca (27) studied Business Management at the Ansbach University of Applied Sciences and specialized in Personnel and Communications Management and Controlling. Clearly not a path of studies foreign to Audi. However, his internships had not given him any corporate experience. FJE provided him with the perfect opportunity. “I had been in event management and interned at a clinic for traditional Chinese medicine and a conference center in Switzerland,” he explains. “But I wanted a broader perspective than my studies could afford, gathering as many different experiences as possible.” Steca’s first contact with Audi took place during a collegiate career fair. What particularly fascinated him was the clarity of the 2015 corporate strategy and its objective to become the most attractive employer. “It’s important to me that the workforce be the focal point of a company.”

After his initiation in the Human Resources Marketing segment, were he was entrusted with various projects, he spent the second half of the program in Organizational Development, assisting department advisors and taking on projects of his own, such as in the area of corporate ethics and culture.

As Dr Quenzler sums up the program’s advantages: “Participants acquire comprehensive skills, while getting an interesting insight into the corporate structure. Audi benefits as well from the diversity of the graduates’ educations – it’s a win-win situation!”