Todays blog is another guest blog, this time written by a German employee who was in the UK on a work exchange programme. Vanessa joined VABS for 3 weeks to gain experience of how we work in the UK and to improve her business English. It was an absolute pleasure hosting such an eager person and it wasn’t all one way…I learned a few things from her too.
Hey Guys!
This is Vanessa Koenig from Germany. I worked with Michelle for the last three weeks and now I want to do a short report on my work experience.
First of all I have to say that it was a big change for me to work from home because in Germany I work for a big company with many employees.
On the first day we’ve met a prospective client. That was great because I had the possibility to follow the whole work process right from the start. In the following days I had to do a lot of research on suitable systems for that client. Another thing I’ve done is bookkeeping, e.g. enter outgoing and incoming payments in the system or compare bank statements to our system. Furthermore I did some marketing tasks. I worked on twitter feeds for a client and I had to join a marketing action at his shop.
In the second week we were working outside the office most of the time. We visited clients to do their bookkeeping and to do training with one of them who had recently replaced his old bookkeeping system. In the middle of the week we went to a B2B Roadshow and to Business Banter. This was an interesting experience, because we don’t have these networking events in Germany. In my opinion that’s a good way get in touch with other business people and possible clients. At the end of the week I did a lot of research on systems again and tested some of them. Finally we went to the client’s house to set up the new systems.
My third week started at the client’s house again. We went on with setting up the new systems and showing the client how the systems work. The other days we had to do bookkeeping things at home and at a client’s shop. On Thursday we visited an exhibition at the SECC which was very exciting. We met many people over there and listened to some interesting talks.
To do a short sum up of my experience: it was great and I really enjoyed working here. In my opinion there is a very big difference between the ways work is done. We neither do cloud computing nor networking. If you ask me the Germans should open their minds for “new” things like that, because it could be a big profit for them.
Now I want to say thank you to Michelle 🙂 I’m absolutely happy that I had the possibility to work with her for last the three weeks. I had a wide field of activity and learned a lot of things during this time. So, thank you very much, Michelle.
