My travel Diary: From Schiltach to Burgess Hill

I am Kristina and I am a trainee at VEGA Grieshaber KG in Schiltach. Currently I am doing an apprenticeship as an industrial clerk with an additional qualification in international business management.
In course of this apprenticeship I was allowed to spend six weeks at our UK subsidiary, VEGA Controls in Burgess Hill. There I had the opportunity to work in the Marketing department. In this blog article I will tell you more about my experiences I had during my time abroad. 

In order to grant me an insight in various task fields of the marketing department, my colleagues made sure to prepare a variety of tasks for me.
One of those tasks concerned was Social Media. I was allowed to operate with LinkedIn and our VEGA Controls Blog.

One of my LinkedIn task was to expand the networks of our Sales Engineers by connecting with their important customers. This project had the objective to reach more people with our posts on the VEGA Controls LinkedIn profile and therefore increase our company’s presence on this platform. Furthermore I was allowed to publish general LinkedIn posts on this profile.
I also had the opportunity to get to know new programs, which we don’t use in Germany. Therefore I was allowed to work with Hootsuite in order to publish LinkedIn posts and with E-Shot to send out Newsletters to our customers.

Another task of mine was to do a study on potential OEM customers in the Food & Beverage  Industry. Within this task I had to search for machinery manufacturers and project companies in the UK market.

As this project regarded the food and beverage Industry, my next task also concerned this application area. In course of this task I was allowed to write and publish various blog articles at the VEGA Controls blog regarding the application field named above.
In order to have topics to write about, I had the opportunity to visit our customers, The Macallan and Grants(Dufftown) in Scotland, as well as Konings Juice & Drinks Limited in Suffolk.
Thanks to those trips I had the chance to get to know the application of our VEGA devices in the food & beverage industry and the work of the VEGA employees, who are based outside the VEGA Controls office.

One thing about the UK, which really stuck out to me, was that everyone who I met was very friendly, open and helpful. Whether you had questions or just wanted to have a chat, everyone was happy to help and took the time for you.
Another thing which I found quite convenient was, that stores are open on Sundays at well. As I am used to the opening hours of stores in Germany, which are closed every Sunday, it was quite something special for me to have the opportunity to shop whenever I want.

To sum up it can be said that I really enjoyed my time in Burgess Hill. I partially owe this to the wide range of tasks in the Marketing department, which offered me diverse work experience and kept me busy.
Another thing which made my time abroad so special were my experiences which I made on my weekend trips, I was able to see various parts of the UK, be more independent and further enhance my language skills.
Finally I had such a great time in the UK because of my colleagues who were really welcoming and integrated me into their team – thank you very much for that guys.