“The program is focused on customer benefits,” emphasizes Markus Mader, Chief Financial Officer of Voith Hydro. “Each candidate goes through foreign assignments and works in sister companies, which broadens their horizons to the maximum. This makes it much easier to understand the pain points of a consortium partner, the sales unit or even the holding company. And this helps them overcome challenges together even better.”

The program’s structure reflects its high degree of practical and customer relevance. The HDP is divided into three training periods of six months each, at least one of which must be completed in a region other than the participant’s home region. The content and business cases that the participant will work on during the program are defined during a two-month planning phase beforehand. Each participant has a mentor to provide support in professional or technical matters. In the 13 years that the HDP has been conducted to date, participants have worked on the development of generator modernization options, improved collaboration in international project execution, and optimization of the balance of plant and quality documentation. Development meetings are scheduled between training segments to review the participants’ progress. The culmination of their work on the business scenarios is a final presentation of the results. The location and audience underline the importance of the program – participants present their results directly to the Executive Board of Voith Hydro in Heidenheim. This is followed by the two-month final phase of the program. What the HDP participants have acquired in terms of professional qualifications, market knowledge and contacts forms the basis for their further careers at Hydro – and is already extremely well developed.

Jennifer Stütz emphasizes how the program expanded her expertise on many levels. When the current project manager joined Voith in 2012 as part of her cooperative degree program in industrial engineering, she first trained in various departments at Voith Hydro. Participation in the Hydro Development Program was then another important step in her professional development, she says. “I was particularly attracted to the opportunity to discover new areas of Voith Hydro, to expand my network, and also to look beyond the horizons of my own field of work for once,” she says, describing her motivation.

Stütz cites the first stop on her HDP journey, Research & Development, as an example. Here she was trained in the hydraulic design of various types of turbines. “Up until then, I had only ever used the results from this department. Today, I understand the process behind them and all the hard work my colleagues do to select an ideal solution for customers that is tailored specifically to each power plant site.”

But the program expanded her expertise even beyond that. In her second HDP stint, Stütz had the chance to work at Voith Hydro Shanghai in China, familiarizing herself with the market situation in Asia and becoming familiar with the cultural differences firsthand. During her third assignment, she led an R&D project team working on electric motors. All of the skills she acquired benefit her today, says the 28-yearold. “The knowledge I gained from the theoretical training sessions helps me deal with challenging situations. The personal connections and especially the technical background knowledge from the trainee program help me in my daily decisions.”

This is an opinion shared by Stütz’s 45-year-old coworker Harikumar Kathirvel. “The program helps you develop in many different ways,” states the mechanical engineer. During his HDP assignments in Brazil, North America and Germany, he had to prove himself in the sales and quotation department as well as in the modernization of a power plant unit and the production of synchronous generators.

In addition to the technical aspects, he emphasizes the importance of cultural awareness, not least from the perspective of a globally active technology group. Working shoulder to shoulder with people from other cultural backgrounds is becoming increasingly frequent and therefore more important, says the current Vice President Project Execution at Voith Hydro. That’s why the HDP’s structure with trainees working at various international locations is so important – both today and even more so in the future.