Work placements at Service-Bund

Our student Lena reports on her work placements with her practical partner Service-Bund.

“Griaß di” and welcome to Lower Bavaria – this winter I moved to Vilshofen an der Donau near Passau for my work placement at Service-Bund. There, I not only learned a great deal about website design, search engine optimisation, also known as SEO, and product photography, but also quite a bit about the Bavarian dialect and Bavarian traditions. As on every occasion during my work placements, I was also able to discover another new part of Germany.

I spent most of my recent work placement in marketing and was able to take independent responsibility for revising and updating the homepage. After familiarising myself with the program used to edit the website, I gained an overview of the current homepage on my own.

I was able to retain many of the existing contents, merely presenting them in a new format, supplementing existing texts, or illustrating the available information with images. At the same time, I was creative myself, wrote new content, and restructured some of the pages. I was given a great deal of freedom in this work, and I particularly enjoyed working independently.

At the same time, because I could turn to both my supervisor and colleagues at the Service-Bund headquarters whenever I had questions or encountered problems, I never once felt left alone with this demanding task.
The helpfulness and openness of the employees is an added value that I have experienced in all of my work placements so far, and it has made settling in quickly at the different locations much easier for me every time. Whether at Christmas parties, barbecues in the garden pavilion, carnival sessions, or relaxing at the beach at the end of the day, I have always received a warm welcome in my private life as well and was integrated very well.

Despite being part of the same group, the individual shareholders of Service-Bund differ in their size, focus, and organisation, which means that the tasks awaiting us as dual-study students are very diverse and vary greatly.
Troiber, for example, not only distributes a comprehensive full product range, but has also been producing by hand its own selection of delicatessen salads, fish marinades, antipasti variations, convenience products, sauces, and dressings for over 60 years. As part of my work placement, I was able to look around the production facilities and also created new product photos for many of the products. This gave me the opportunity not only to expand my product knowledge and work across departmental boundaries, but also to learn a great deal about arranging food for photography.

In addition, during the ten weeks I spent in Lower Bavaria, I had the opportunity to get to know other areas of the company. For example, I visited some customers with the field sales team, accompanied one of the truck drivers on deliveries, took part in various training sessions, and looked at the day-to-day business of colleagues in purchasing. All in all, a very exciting and above all varied work placement!

In my free time, I explored the nearby cities of Passau, Regensburg, and Nuremberg, went skiing in the Bavarian Forest, and celebrated carnival with my colleagues, which rounded off my work placement perfectly.

Lena Jost, 3rd semester, Bachelor’s student in Business Administration – Rethinking Business with practical partner Service-Bund