Your career at Viega can start after some years in another company or as a trainee at Viega directly. One of our - now experienced trainees - provides you with the opportinity to get a glimpse of his technical and personal development: I studied mechanical engineering and started a trainee programme with Viega. I have helped to shape the 12-18 month programme from the outset. During this time I have worked in different departments and found out how the company works. I have also developed good contacts with my colleagues and have been able in this way to prepare for my future work as a professional.

My days in the R&D department now normally begins between 6 and 8 am, when I check my e-mail and appointments for the day, e.g. a technical marketing meeting at 10 am. In this project I took over the function of project leader. I had prepared fully for this meeting and wrote a report on the competition. With this preparation the meeting was not a great challenge as I have managed to acquire some key skills in the last six months to deal with tasks like this in the company. These skills include the technical and economic evaluation of products, and corporate thinking. As far as soft skills are concerns, I have managed to improve my powers of persuasion and my personal appearance. Viega offers very good seminars in this respect, such as “Basic principles of communication” or “Presentation techniques”.
After the meeting I made a drawing for a predevelopment project that I am working on parallel to the trainee programme. It concerns an alternative manufacturing process for a product. This predevelopment project is a great help for me in learning about the processes in the different departments, because I have an end result in mind and can study the processes on the basis of a specific product.
In the afternoon I had an appointment in Technical Marketing at which the product manager presented the company’s Profipress programme. He and the product developer consulted me on several occasions about my view of the product. This experience and knowledge of what the market and our customers demand enlarged my view as a product developer.
Then I planned the assembly tests agreed in the meeting. These tests will analyse the strengths and weaknesses of our product and those of our competitors to enable us to optimise the existing product range. I identified the main competitors and ordered the components required for the tests. I also drew up a detailed plan for the test design, implementation and objectives.
I finished the tasks I had set myself in the late afternoon and used the remaining time for some organisational tasks, e.g. filling out the activity sheet and answering e-mails.