In this post, I will share my graduate trainee rotation plan and describe the trainee activities that have to be completed as part of the curriculum of the MAN trainee program.
Rotation Plan
My overall strategy for the rotation plan is to stay in each department for as long as I can. Through past experience, it usually takes me about 12 weeks to being a project to a good situation, without other distractions. To my surprise, my mentor, Sebastian, also agreed to staying longer in each department. To him, staying longer means bridging meaningful connections that lasts in the long run. One also gets the opportunity to understand the department at a deeper level, which I also find important, especially in more technology-or engineering-oriented departments. I couldn’t agree more, and I am glad we are on the same page.
There is however one main constraint to my strategy : I need to have at least 5 rotations in 15 months. This means staying for 12 weeks is not really an option. Here is however my best shot. Other contraints that one should know about are that one should not stay for more than 90 days abroad. This 90-day constraint is however “refreshed” after returning to Germany for four weeks.
Image 1: My rotation plan
My rotation plan consists of 5 different rotations. Those marked in green are trainee activities. The details of these you can find in image 2. The way these activities are designed seem to be a way to bring the trainees from different departments to experience teamwork in a multi-disciplinary setting.
In summary,
- Production (data department) - Home department
- Autonomous Driving
- Centre of Enablement for AI
- Engineering (Vehicle software)
- Sales (data department)
Trainee Activities
A good thing to know is that Trainee Activities can really take up a significant portion of your time. I would reccommend communicating clearly and early on with the department you are on rotation with about expectation of your deliverables early on. Other difficulties I have encountered include not getting timely access to special accounts (PowerBI) to start working on a project.
Image 2: Trainee Activities
In the next section here, I would document briefly what these Trainee Activities are and how many people were involved in the organisation of these activities. During the onboarding session in the first week of work, the trainees from the last generation presented us with this table. Each trainee will take on the organisation work of roughly two to three trainee activities depending on workload.
Executive Exchanges (4 trainees)
Organise meetings with executives of MAN for the rest of the trainee group. This year we had the opportunity to meet the executive member representing HR (Hubert Altschäffel), Finance (Inka Koljonen) and Chief Executive Officer (Alexander Vlaskampf). We were also introduced to their assistants and could raise any questions we might have for them.
Panel Discussion (4 trainees)
Trainees involved in the organisation are tasked to come up with a panel discussion topic and moderate. This year the event is a hybrid one over a Teams Townhall event and at an auditorium. External vendors are hired to set up professional camera and audio equipment to support the event. Over 200 online participants joined and 40 individuals were invited to join the on-site event.
Munich Geschenkeregen (4 trainees)
Trainees are tasked to organise presents for community organisations where children live during the Christmas period. The presents are gifted by MAN employees, where each gift does not exceed a budget of 15 Euros. The children were free to pick a gift and MAN employees had to organise them and pass them to the trainees.
Trainee Alumni Platform (4 trainees)
Organise a fortnightly regular’s table (Stammtisch) on Thursday at 7pm.Trainees of all generation are invited to join to reconnect. Post regularly on a LinkedIn platform that contains only trainees from all generations. Encourage current generation trainees to create a video of themselves without their face on it (aka. the No-Face-Challenge)
Project Week on Agile Methods (5 trainees)
An intense week where trainees are tasked to create an application in agile manner that could be potentially used in the future. The organisation team had to get into contact with an agile coach, come up with a topic and assign agile roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, UI/UX designer and Developers)to the trainee group. This year they also deployed a Jira dashboard for a more immersive agile experience.
Summer/Winter Cabin (4 trainees)
Organise a 3 days 2 night event in a cabin in the Alps of Austria. All trainee generations are invited to join. This year, four generations joined making 35 people. Book the cabin, organise food, music and activities for the event.
Doktoranden Exchange (2 trainees)
A networking event with PhDs who are currently working in MAN.
Munich Trainee network (2 trainees)
A networking event with trainees from other companies in Munich - BMW, Infineon are amongst those companies
VW Trainee network (2 trainees)
Organise a networking event with trainees from the VW brand. This event will happen in Barcelona early april this year.