The successful entry into the planning & analytics consulting world alongside your studies

Our colleague Vinzenz Klass from Zurich reports on his successful entry and rapid professional development and how the valantic team supported and promoted him alongside his studies: “The young team in Zurich is just cool!”

How did you get to valantic?

I became aware of valantic in summer 2021, when I heard about its commitment to universities and the opportunities it offers to working students. During the practical phase of my business information studies at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, I was able to complete my company-related practical project in cooperation with valantic in Zurich. In close collaboration with planning consultants from valantic, I developed my own prototype by the end of December 2021, which is supposed to implement an Anaplan – SAP – data integration. As part of my final thesis, which should be complete by summer 2022, I am continuing to work on these prototype with the aim of developing a first demonstrable product design including the business context. Thanks to this constructive cooperation, it was very easy for me to decide to continue my career discussions with valantic, and so it happened that I started as a consultant on the Zurich team on a part-time basis in February 2022. I will be completing my studies in parallel to this. In the summer of this year, I will start a full-time position in planning & analytics.

That sounds really exciting, Vinzenz. Can you tell us a bit more about your prototype?

The prototype started as a simple PoC, in order to provide a feasibility test for the theoretically designed solution. In the meantime, the prototype has come so far that it can be operated via a user-friendly interface and several source and target systems can be configured; this is a frequently-requested customer requirement. In addition, cyclic actions can also be created based on user-defined intervals.

The end user can exchange data between SAP and Anaplan with just a few clicks, or completely automatically with the scheduler service. The next step would be to deploy the prototype in the cloud and make it available as an SaaS-like intermediate service for a Beta test.

Wow, what a product you have developed in this brief time. Impressive! What do you especially like about valantic?

The pragmatic mentality and cooperation won me over immediately, because I really did not expect the very first presentation of my prototype to be so easy and solution-oriented at the same time. I was also impressed by the enormous flexibility and the way in which my needs were addressed so that I can work part-time until my studies are complete. Worthy of mention is also the great trust that is currently being placed in me in order to be able to dive seamlessly into the working world of the planning & analytics consultant in just a few months. The daily work on the team could not be more exciting, as I like developing individual problem solutions tremendously and there is definitely no shortage of those here. Since I joined the valantic team, I have never had to do the same job twice in a row; instead, I work on new solutions every day. And the young team in Zurich is just cool.

Where do you see yourself in three years?

I honestly don’t know that yet, as I have to find my way and orient myself after completing my studies. However, it is certain that I would like to greatly expand my professional experience and project knowledge as part of the valantic team in the near future. In the medium term, a professional master’s degree in a specific subject area would certainly be exciting, but that’s also easily possible at valantic.

Thank you Vinzenz for the great conversation!