365 days as a Junior Consultant at Vasco: wow, what a year!
I have been working as a Junior Consultant at Vasco Consult since August 2021. Now, more than a year on, I would like to tell you about my first year as a Junior Consultant. Why? Well, because it has been an amazing year! A year in which I got to know a lot of new people, took in a lot of new impressions and above all learned a very great deal. But first let me tell you how I ended up at Vasco.
Well, in the spring of 2021 I am still very busy working on my thesis for my Master’s degree in Business Administration and am not really thinking about my life after that. To be honest, I am finding it difficult to decide what I want to do after my Master’s. Pretty impulsively, I decide to change my profile on LinkedIn to being available for a new job. I want to see what the outcome of this will be but you have probably already guessed it: once you have set your profile to this, you get a flood of messages from recruiters, and I am buried under a huge pile of them. I am approached for a range of positions, mainly in consultancy. At that time, I still don’t have much of an idea about what consultancy entails, so I start looking into this area in more detail. Helping companies to achieve their goals, helping organisations to grow, ensuring that companies can serve their customers better: it all sounds like music to my ears. I find it really interesting. The notion that I can help companies with my knowledge and skills encourages me to respond to the recruiters’ requests and to have discussions with a range of consultancies. However, I don’t find a match. Many companies offer so-called ‘360-degree positions’ in which the giving of advice is combined with hard selling and (in many cases) HR. It would be a great way to give myself a broader focus but I do note that above all it is the direct provision of service to companies that attracts me.
Then I am approached by Vasco Consult. For someone who is not so keen to move into sales, I am quickly sold on the idea. Vasco has a no-nonsense mentality and sets itself apart by just getting on with it: devising solutions that it then implements quickly and well in order to achieve good results. Instead of overblown advisory reports, it directly adds value to companies by simplifying fairly complex solutions that it then implements. And with Vasco I have the feeling (which I now know first-hand to be true) that even I, in a junior position and fresh out of university, can start making a contribution right away. This in combination with the fact that Vasco is a young and rapidly growing company where I also see opportunities to do my bit makes Vasco my ideal first step as a fulltime professional. After a number of positive interviews that further stoke my enthusiasm, we decide to take the plunge together. Or, expressing it in Vasco’s terminology, to cross that bridge together.
Vasco more than makes good on its promises. ‘Doing’ is the magic word. You don’t start at Vasco by taking a pre-arranged training programme - instead, you learn on the job. For instance, right from my first day of work I am directly involved in a project team of three Vasco consultants who are working hand-in-hand with an international shipping company’s own large project team. Under this programme, I am quickly given the responsibility for multiple subprojects. My other Vasco colleagues are closely involved in these too, so that you never feel you have been cast adrift; instead, you always keep learning a lot from their experience and expertise. Our programme involves a lot of transformation management, a major aspect of which is business readiness, which means preparing the people in the organisation for changes. This programme involves a number of different departments and management layers within the organisation. This variation in work means you get to look behind the scenes and find out for yourself what interests you. You then use your interests to build your own ‘bridge of learning’. This too is typical of Vasco, as it offers you many options for taking courses and training modules, both in-house and externally, so that you can specialise further in a discipline such as data management or change management that appeals to you.
In addition, I have learned so much from my colleagues. Meetings are regularly organised in which you are given the opportunity to share experiences. Juniors, seniors or managers - it makes no difference, as at Visco, everybody is equal and easy to talk to. And everyone is as eager as everyone else to learn from each other. The flat organisational structure with its informal edge means that for me, Vasco feels like both a warm bath and a tight-knit family. This, when combined with fun team-building activities that include get-togethers, dinners, days out and trips (Portugal!) means that in my eyes, Vasco is the ideal employer.
Are you now just as enthusiastic as me about Vasco Consult? And would you like to learn more, either about my own day-to-day work or about Vasco and its other services in general? Then just get in touch with me via LinkedIn or else visit our brand-new website www.vasco-consult.com.
