The fast changing environment and technology around us impact both the energy market and customer expectations. This makes digitalization, agility and innovation more important than ever.
Who I am
Ever since I was a young girl I have been motivated and challenged by change – to experience new environments and situations, meet new people and be flexible in adapting to different circumstances.
I would never want to end up being stuck in a routine. Keeping this in mind after I graduated with the Masters of Business Information Management and Finance & Accounting about a year ago, I applied for a Trainee position with Agile IT at Vattenfall.
What I do
The fast changing environment and technology around us impact both the energy market and customer expectations. This makes digitalization, agility and innovation more important than ever – and the Agile IT department is driving this by enabling flexible and fast IT development. You might associate working in IT with writing code, but to be honest I have never written a line of code in my entire life. My role within Agile IT is mainly focused on facilitation, support, coordination and reporting. For example, I was involved in conducting workshops with Agile teams to identify improvement topics. Fine tuning the model used, coordinating activities across countries, looking for common improvements, knowledge sharing and setting up the process for yearly evaluations are my responsibility. Another example of what I am working on at the moment is the Agile roadmap and our agile maturity in general.
The best thing about my job? So far, no two days have been the same.
A day in my life
8:45
As I enter the office, I greet several colleagues at the coffee corner and I find a spot in one of the IT areas in our flex office. With my morning tea, I scan the intranet and see that the article about our internal hackathon for Vattenfall IT has been published. Co-organizing this event was a lot of fun and it allowed me to meet many new people. Also, it was great to see that such events are organized within Vattenfall to motivate employees to step out of their daily routines, stimulate innovation and creativity by doing something completely different for 24 hours.
10:00
After answering my emails and making some final preparations, my colleague and I join a Skype call with the Agile teams in Sweden. The teams present their identified improvement topics for the upcoming year, based on the workshop we organized last week. By focusing on these improvement topics, the teams will be able to increase speed, quality and reliability, thereby enabling them to deliver business value faster.
12:30
I head to lunch with my fellow-trainees who are currently in Amsterdam for their assignments. We talk about the final seminar week and the trainee hackathon, for which we will spend the final two weeks of our traineeship together at the end of August. One week we will be in Sweden for our own hackathon that we organized together with R&D and E-mobility, working on the future of fast charging and E-mobility within Vattenfall. Afterwards we will head to the UK for the closing seminar week of the trainee program, where we will have several trainings, visit one of Vattenfall's wind farms and of course have a lot of fun.
13:30
As I have some time left before my next meeting, I decide to have a look at our digital competitive intelligence platform. For my first trainee assignment I was located at the Headquarters in Solna, where I worked in the Business Intelligence team in the Strategic Development department, supporting the roll-out of this platform to the various Business Areas. This assignment provided me with a better understanding of the value of competitive intelligence and digitalization within the company, as well as an insight in Vattenfall's group strategy and the specific strategy of the various Business Areas.
14:15
My next meeting is the weekly status update of the project of my second assignment, for which I spent 10 weeks in Berlin. This assignment centered around digitalization too, albeit differently: working within a project focused on the future digital service experience. After finishing my time in Berlin I was happy to be asked to continue my tasks even after my assignment was finished. This way I am still responsible for the coordination of one of the side-tracks of the project - investigating the value potential of a new solution for our customer service. A great benefit that comes with this task is that it allows me to easily keep in touch with my colleagues that I met during my time in Berlin.
16:00
Before I head home, I finish my work for today and prepare a presentation for the next day. After that I spend some time answering questions on our trainee platform, reflecting on the insights of my last assignment. I feel that with the experiences we as trainees gain in our trainee year, I am well-prepared to continue an exciting career at Vattenfall.