"Variety is the word that best captures what I like most about Avencore"

Valentin Lehmann – Senior Consultant – TU Darmstadt (2022)

What do you like most about your job as a consultant and working at Avencore?

Variety.

Variety is the word that best captures what I like most about Avencore. In my 4 years in the company, I have performed over 25 projects for nearly as many customers, in very diverse industrial sectors. And each project comes with new, exciting challenges.

No two projects are the same. Maybe the industry, customer, or project type is similar, but the combination of the three rarely is. And if it is, the project teams & human factor are the ultimate differentiating aspects.

What tips do you have for students about starting a career in consulting?

As the fields of work at Avencore are so vastly diverse, the most important thing to bring is curiosity and the ambition to grow as an individual. Curiosity will motivate you every day to research the new product, industry, or project type. Your ambition to grow will allow you to put all the newly acquired knowledge in a growing bouquet of skills you can draw from forever in your future career.

And trust me on this one: I am yet to find an area more pre-destined for a steep learning curve than Consulting – especially at Avencore, where you can collect expertise at the customer site from day one.

How did you progress at Avencore?

When I started my journey at Avencore, I was a fresh university graduate. I didn’t yet know my way around in the working world, and especially not in Consulting. It helped a lot to have a great team of people always ready to help and share their knowledge, from day one.

Like that, I felt more or less ready to tackle my first business trip to the client, roughly two weeks into my new job. It was a crazy trip that I will never forget, with a full car of consultants with loud music on the speakers, driving through the Czech countryside – welcome to the team!

Now, 4 years later, I am the lucky person to be able to teach new Consultants what I have already learned and provide those incredible experiences & project results. While, of course, still on a steep learning curve myself, learning from amazing, experienced people. It never gets boring!

What does a typical week as an Avencore consultant look like for you?

A typical week at Avencore starts with short internal alignment meetings per project on Monday morning from the home office. After preparing for the week ahead, I will usually leave in the evening to travel to the customer’s site. This site can be anywhere, but usually not more than 3 hours by train.

Tuesday to Thursday is when the magic happens: At the customer’s site, we perform creativity workshops with the most experienced engineers, shopfloor walks seeing amazing products up close, and roughly once per month, a Steering Committee, where we can present our great achievements to top-level management.

Friday, back at home, I will usually go to the office and have a great time with my colleagues while consolidating all project insights of the week and preparing for the next week. Friday is also the day for all internal activities, like our weekly team meeting, where we share the most exciting insights from all projects.

And last but not least, the weekend. Which, unlike at other consultancies, really is a weekend that I can use for my private projects & friends.

What was useful in your studies to work at Avencore?

I studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt. To be quite frank, I didn’t initially intend to start in Consulting because I thought my engineering degree would be wasted. After I got to know the great team & the clear engineering focus of Avencore in the recruiting process, I decided to give it a shot – and it was the best decision I could have made!

Today, I can leverage all my technical know-how in in-depth discussions about the design of the customers’ product in intense creativity workshops. But I also put an additional layer on top of that from my training at Avencore, which really makes me understand the cost structure of the customer, their business processes & strategy.

Variety, complex problem solving, and a steep learning curve are what motivate me the most in my work as a Consultant at Avencore – an engineering degree is an optimal foundation to build this on.