Into the Future Have you ever wished you could look into the future? Because now we are going to show you a potential glimpse of what your future could look like. We took on the role as fortune tellers and talked to three different people that now work at Prodrive Technologies, but were students in our department before. Maybe it is in the cards where your future could be heading? TEXT Vita Broeken DESIGN Caitlin Riesewijk
Potential futures at Prodrive Jorg van Heesch
The first card of the fortune teller is represented by Jorg van Heesch. He is a data engineer (or translator, depends on who you ask) and almost graduated 2 years ago from MSE. He started with a focus on quality and reliability, and now focuses on various topics. He explains: “I am not the best at coding, but my strength lies with implementing, communicating the right information and taking people along in the process. Not only is this my strength, but I am passionate about it, and that’s important.” In his daily work he works on interpreting, communicating and SCOPE MARCH 2022
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analyzing data to improve many different aspects of the organization. With his team they collect data and translate it to a report that can be used by the many different departments and teams within Prodrive. This helps the organization to become more data-driven, and there will be less “gebeun” in Excel. He discusses with people, especially on the production floor, what their struggles are related to analytics (e.g. machine performance), and helps them solve these issues. Jorg explains that he still uses many of his skills and topics learned during his studies, especially the way of approaching problems. But looking back, he realizes that he should have taken more human performance and organizational change courses. As he mentioned, changing a process is one things, but communicating to and convincing stakeholders is more important. Furthermore, he believes that all the programming and business analytics courses are very useful.
When he tells us about his favorite memory, he apologizes “That’s difficult, because I started during covid”. However, he mentions a story about one of his favorite moments with his colleagues, “together with a couple of colleagues we went cycling after work. We went for a 70km ride, and after that ride Bram Linders manages to ride a KOM, just before I could”. For the noncyclist among us, this is short for King of the Mountain, and is something you get when you ride a certain segment at the fastest pace. Jorg tells us how this moment felt great, that even though he was hungry, and it was late, they still aim for the best. He advises students to find a job that you like and are enthusiastic about. You should care for your work and be able to perform it for 40 hours a week, and 45 weeks a year. Try to figure this out during your studies, do internships, try different jobs, and enjoy your studies!
