“It’s not unusual for a girl or woman of our generation to be interested in technology, to select a technical course of studies or pursue a technical career,” said Jasmin Mücke. Laura Loebnitz agreed: “For the first time, half of the students were women in our industrial engineering program at DHBW in Mannheim, Germany. In the past, there might have been just a handful. That has changed – in classrooms as well as careers. Women just need to be confident and open to technical careers. Then they have a good chance of success.” Between 2018 and 2021, the two women participated in work-study at Freudenberg Sealing Technologies (FST) and took industrial engineering courses at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW) in Germany. They have now worked in Sales General Industry (GI) for more than a year.
Laura Loebnitz
Understanding what’s involved technically
Laura Loebnitz chose to study and work at the interface of engineering and business. “Business studies alone would have been too dry for me. And I didn’t want to study mechanical engineering since I didn’t intend to work in product development or manufacturing. From the beginning, my goal was to build up my technical knowledge so I could coordinate processes,” she said. After what she described as a “short and snappy course of studies,” she took on two assignments at the start of her GI career. One involves Inside Sales: She handles commercial processing for a specific customer group in coordination with account managers. In this role, she also deals with requests and sample processing in coordination with Lead Centers. “I am becoming very familiar with sales processes and systems here – including SAP 1) and CRM2) – and am in contact with customers,” she said.
Her second area of responsibility – phone selling – builds on those duties. In this case, her job is to further develop relatively small regular customers and acquire new customers by telephone. Sales GI has established phone selling as a complement to the work of classic account managers and Inside Sales staff. The move is a response to the growing importance of telephone sales. In her bachelor-level studies, Loebnitz developed a handbook describing the content and objective of phone selling and the duties of staff entrusted with it.
“I enjoy approaching people. It’s in my nature,” Loebnitz said. She could easily imagine herself moving to GI External Sales in the medium term. She has felt welcome in the FST sales organization and believes she is in good hands there. “It is nice to see that my work makes a difference. If I can clarify something today, customers can have their sample parts on-site and start a new project tomorrow.
Her contacts at the customer’s purchasing department are often women without a technical background. “Thanks to my level of knowledge, however, I can present and explain technical issues understandably. They get an idea of our rationale. This often helps me in my everyday work. But on the customer’s technical side, I am almost always communicating with men. I let my technical knowledge flow into these discussions
They revolve around facts. I want to get the idea across that I don’t just handle processing – I have good understanding of what’s involved. As a woman, I feel I am neither at a disadvantage nor am I given preferential treatment. It’s nice that we have a good working atmosphere here at Freudenberg,” she said.
1) SAP is the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that FST uses for its core business activities such as purchasing, production, material management, sales, marketing, finance and human resources.
2) The term Customer Relationship Management, or CRM for short, refers to the systematic organization, maintenance, and administration of customer relationships, along with their documentation with IT processes.
Jasmin Mücke
Not aware of reservations
How do you convert a rectangular passageway into a curved arch? Several years ago, Jasmin Mücke and her father asked themselves the question at the family’s apartment. She had just learned how to determine the vertex of a parabola in her math class. “I just set up a functional equation and calculated the arc. That’s how we actually ended up doing it.”
On the theoretical side, she was interested in math and physics early on. Her practical explorations took the form of “relatively small craft and construction projects with mathematical components,” she said. “Technology is not just something for boys and men. There are girls and women with the same technical capabilities and interests. In our generation, I rarely see a clear-cut distinction by gender,” she said.
Her first position in GI was in the Strategy & Business Support area. To put it simply, Mücke provides GI management with a data-based foundation for business decisions and alternative courses of action, using data analysis and consolidation. She supports centralized processes, coordinates the strategy process and helps with pricing. Her passion for figures and mathematics serves her well. She was quickly up-to-speed with the IT programs used in her job.
“I develop standardized templates for the processes that I support. All the GI segments can use them, which makes us more efficient,” she said. During her bachelor-level work, she developed an Excel file for so-called “strategy implementation reviews.” On one hand, the goal was to enable the segments to minimize the amount of work and time spent on the reviews, and, on the other hand, provide uniform presentations. The work was a big help to her: “I was able to familiarize myself with processes and the entire sales group. That’s a good starting point for many positions where I could end up working,” Mücke said.
Yes, sales is still male-dominated today, she said. “But I haven’t seen any reservations about me as a woman. Being female is not an issue at all in my everyday work. In general, whether you are a man or woman, the company’s doors are open to you. Freudenberg is already quite diverse,” she said.
But she likes the idea of women forming their own networks within the company to share ideas and support one another. And she appreciates the fact that Freudenberg increasingly ensures that women, and not just men, are depicted on posters or in its postings for technical jobs. “I think women subconsciously notice this. It gets their attention.”
And after a year on the job, how is her work-life balance holding up? “I quickly learned to shut down in the evening and attack the work the next day with vigor. Since then, I’ve been able to get the balance right. I haven’t neglected my private life.”
