“Our IT will be increasingly networked with open source—and the market potential is enormous. The question is not whether we will be successful with it, but who will be successful with it,” says Laura Huth, now Tender Manager in the Public Sector division at Bechtle. The 27-year-old is simply enthusiastic about the topic of open source—also thanks to her time as a trainee in Bechtle’s Public Sector. Because, like every trainee, she also dealt intensively with a topic during these nine months in the Public Sector and wrote a project paper about it, namely Open Source – Market Analysis and Business Potential.
Besides this subject-specific deep dive, however, the project work has benefited Laura much more: “I got to know Bechtle better and made a lot of contacts—quite quickly and also across divisions,” she tells us.
This was also the case for Jonas Herre, now also a tender manager in the public sector, when he was researching for his project work: “My interviewees were super open and always made time for me.” His project work’s topic was idea management. Because the employees usually know exactly where and how something can be optimised. But without a dedicated and preferably anonymised process, these valuable impulses may be lost in everyday life or even remain unspoken.
“The impetus came from an internal employee survey,” explains the 25-year-old, who ultimately worked out what shape idea management could take for Bechtle’s Public Sector division. Jonas already knows this at this point, but his colleagues don’t yet, because now the whole project first has to be reviewed by management.
“We are currently looking at the concept that Jonas has developed and checking the process to see if we can implement it in this way,” says Bernd Schmid, Head of PSD and Head of Tender Management Europe. “We are also pleased that our trainees’ projects always bring something to the table. And not just for us, but for the trainees in particular—we pay attention to that.”
Jonas is just as convinced of the benefits of idea management as Laura is of the advantages of open source for the public sector. “It’s cool to be able to do something like this,” Jonas and Laura agree. With their experience and knowledge from the trainee programme in general and the project work in the public sector in particular, the two now feel well prepared for their new tasks as tender managers.
