About me

My Story

I was born in 1968 and grew up in the beautiful city of Brunsbüttel. The city, located at the mouth of the Elbe River, marks the beginning or the end of the Kiel Canal, depending on your perspective. For me, Brunsbüttel has always been the beginning of the canal.

After successfully completing elementary school, my parents sent me to secondary school. Back then, in 1978, a good secondary school diploma still meant something. However, this changed a bit by the time I graduated in 1983. I decided to pursue my intermediate diploma at the vocational school in Meldorf. However, I dropped out after the first year to start an apprenticeship. In between, I joined the Brunsbüttel Youth Fire Brigade in 1980, and from 1986, I was an active member of the Brunsbüttel Volunteer Fire Brigade.

I began my apprenticeship as a measurement and control mechanic in 1984 at Schelde Chemie, later Bayer AG, in Brunsbüttel. The three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship went smoothly, and in 1988, I received my journeyman’s certificate. I was then offered a permanent position at Bayer AG. I worked for another three and a half years at Bayer AG in the process control technology (PLT) of the I-Gamma plant. However, during this time, I realized that this couldn’t be everything. Further education was hindered by my low school diploma. But there was a solution to this problem.

In Egelsbach, I took on the position of maintenance engineer in the technical center of Fleissner, a mechanical engineering company in the textile industry. However, the intermezzo was not of long duration, partly because the technical center and production could not be operated simultaneously due to the weak power supply. This meant that we in the technical center maintained the machines and prepared customer trials during production times from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM. The trials then started at 5:00 PM and often lasted until 11:00 PM. Since I was the only engineer in the technical center, I had to be present the whole time. I resigned during the probationary period and switched to Deutsche Telekom in the development center in Darmstadt.

Finally, I had a job in software development, and I went through all the stages that exist in software development. I started with software configuration management, where I set up a competence center that offered configuration management as a service across the development center. I spoke at conferences, gave training, and became the expert on this topic. Over time, I became a team leader for software testing teams, developed software, and got certified as a project manager (PMI). During the early 2000s, many other exciting things happened in my life. I met my future wife, and after 9/11, we decided to get married. Our daughter was born in September 2002, and our son in May 2004. I renovated a house and started playing darts actively. The birth of my children also rekindled my love for photography, which I had started in the 1980s.

I am still with this company today, leading a team in Germany and two teams in Bangalore, India. In total, there are 20 employees, 4 in Germany and 16 in India. We continue to develop software and apps for our service and our customers.

This is my life up to today, and hopefully, there is still a long way to go. In May 2024, I turned 56 years old and still have some plans.

… to be continued

To catch up on the missing university entrance qualification that would allow me to study, I enrolled in the VHS Brunsbüttel preparatory course for the entrance exam for technical colleges in Schleswig-Holstein. This began two years of attending evening school three times a week. For some, it was a torment; only nine out of thirty completed it. For me, it wasn’t a joy, but I had a goal in mind. In the summer of 1991, I passed the entrance exam with good grades and started looking for a place to study. I had the choice between the technical colleges in Lübeck, Flensburg, and Wedel. I chose the FH Flensburg because I already had contacts there. So, in the fall of 1991, I started studying electrical engineering, with a focus on technical computer science in the main study period. I completed my studies in January 1995 within the standard period of study with a degree in Dipl.-Ing (FH).

In the mid-1990s, the job market was not exactly flooded with job offers for young engineers. So, my path led me back to Brunsbüttel, where, after six months of job searching, I joined the Kruse forwarding company as the technical manager of the high-bay warehouse, which was still under construction. There, I also gained my first leadership experience, as I was in charge of two warehouse workers. Ultimately, the job was to keep the warehouse running, as there were frequent breakdowns of the conveyor systems and vehicles, and to load the goods onto the trucks. I was practically a diploma forklift driver. Nevertheless, I held out until the spring of 1998 before moving to the wider world to Egelsbach near Frankfurt am Main.

In 2015, my time with Telekom, or rather T-Systems, came to an end. In 2012, we decided to move to Schleswig-Holstein, and we made this happen in 2013. I worked from home in Itzehoe for another year and a half as my project was coming to an end, and the “danger” of having to go back to the office in Darmstadt grew. So, I decided to change employers. The switch to Lufthansa Technik AG as IT Manager Customs was not of long duration. I left the company during the probationary period and switched to Senvion GmbH in Osterrönfeld as an IT architect in the service. In this company, a manufacturer of wind turbines, I felt comfortable from the beginning. This probably explains my relatively rapid rise. Instead of working as an IT architect, I once again worked as a project manager. My first project was the in-housing of condition-based monitoring of drive trains. A new team had to be hired and built for this. After that, I took over the management of a department with three teams. Through a change in the IT department, I got in touch with the development team in India. By now, the focus of my tasks had expanded to offering general digitalization solutions, with service remaining a focus. In April 2019, Senvion filed for bankruptcy, and a period of uncertainty began. Together with the new IT manager, I managed to keep most of my employees in the company. As part of the team that accompanied the due diligence with potential buyers, it became relatively clear early on where our journey could go. Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy took over the service area and parts of other areas necessary to continue Senvion as Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Service GmbH.