Impressions of our apprentices

Our trainees, and also former trainees, as industrial clerks, Marinela Ojdanić and Leonie Schulmann, talk about their training at PICARD in this blog post.

Are you also still looking for an apprenticeship? Then apply now for the start of training in September 2022. (Click here: https://picard-lederwaren.de/blogs/news/ausbildung-bei-picard)

I started my training as an industrial clerk at PICARD Lederwaren in August 2019 and am now in my third year of training.

The change from school to training was not a particularly big change for me, as I had already done a one-year internship at PICARD before starting my training. The positive impressions that I was able to gather at that time were also confirmed to me during the training. The atmosphere, the employees and the trainees made it easy for me at that time to find my way into the working world and to settle into the company.

During the apprenticeship, you learn about the company's operational processes and visit many different departments. The more departments I visited, the clearer it became to me how many sometimes very different departments work together.
The training at PICARD is versatile, as there are a total of 13 different departments in the company that you can visit. During my time at PICARD, I was already able to get an insight into 12 of them, such as Accounting, Import, B2B, Corporate or Marketing.
But the training goes beyond the offices, including participation in trade fairs. The International Leather Goods Fair in Offenbach takes place twice a year and offers us trainees a good opportunity to be present during sales talks and to be in direct contact with customers.

But I have not only learned activities in the company, I have also been able to take a lot with me personally, such as being able to deal with criticism, to approach new challenging tasks with motivation and interest every day, and to appear more self-confident.
The latter was possible thanks to training as a training ambassador.
Training ambassadors are apprentices who present their professions in schools and promote vocational training. In order to inspire the students of the final classes for a vocational training and to share own experiences with them. During the training, we were taught various presentation techniques, moderation and rhetoric.
I am glad to have had this opportunity during my training.

The training at PICARD is an enrichment for me, as I was able to take my first steps into the working world. I am glad that I will be taken on in sales after my graduation and can thus gain even more experience.

My training began in August 2018. At first I was very excited and quickly unsettled. It was interesting to see how you develop yourself over time and also take away a lot for your everyday work life and for yourself.

In general, working life after school was a big change. You learn to reorder your priorities and how to organize yourself.
During my apprenticeship, we were able to gain a lot of experience as apprentices and also partly learn to organize ourselves and even parties, such as our annual summer party and Christmas party.
In addition, we were always present at the International Leather Goods Fair in Offenbach, where we not only made sure that everything was running smoothly, but were also able to take part in sales talks. I found it particularly interesting to get to know how to deal with customers because it was also important for my future career.
As trainees, we also had other projects, such as an internal company magazine in which we addressed all current topics. What was always nice about these projects was the cooperation and independence among the trainees.
In the course of my first year as an apprentice, I was able to get a first impression of many different departments and make a good contribution there. What I always perceived as quite positive was the fact that I was warmly welcomed in all departments and immediately felt at home.
During my training, I was also asked whether I could imagine being permanently trained in a sales department and then being taken on.
I was very pleased about this and of course I accepted straight away. Over time, I was able to become part of the team and take on responsibility of my own.
My exam period was stressful, also due to the current Corona situation. Not least because there were no lessons at school for some time beforehand, but everything was done via work assignments. This meant that we had a lot of catching up to do before the exam, when we were allowed to have classes again. But by studying a lot, we were able to catch up on most of it.
Fortunately, everything took place as planned (and under strict Corona conditions), and in the end all examinees were happy to have done well.
After that, I went back to my normal day-to-day work in the office and, as I noticed, you never stop learning despite your previous knowledge and can always learn more and take on new challenges in the department.