METRO.digital through the eyes of an intern

If you have ever been in a METRO store you know about the extra-large packages of a huge variety of goods. So wouldn‘t it be great to do an internship there, amongst all the sweets?! I think there would definitely be enough to eat for 2 weeks and it would be very beneficial to explore! Also, my father said that there are many interesting things to discover, but who in my age – by the way I am Annabell, 14 years old and attend the 9th class at Velbert Gymnasium – listens to what the parents recommend. So I applied for a 2 weeks internship at Metro.digital.

We started with a store visit and indeed thousands of products I never saw before and, of course, also many sweets. Besides the goods itself I learned, that there are many IT solutions in place starting at the entry to scan the card, via the electronic shelf label, WLAN access points to the checkout system with real printer. The electronic shelf labels are my favorite solution and super cool.

If the colleagues at METRO.digital are delivering all these solutions, then I had a very first idea what it is to work here and was curious to learn more. I entered the office, received my computer to work on and one hour later I attended my first video call via Microsoft Teams. I got to know Ekaterina Terenteva and Julia Stawicki, who were coaching me and we roughly planned the next two weeks.

Focus of the first week were methodologies of agile software development. Based on some questions and links I started my research on the topic. Highlight of the first week was the participation in a retrospective. In a comfortable atmosphere the team members openly reviewed the past weeks and discussed about good things and also about areas to improve.This way I got a lot input for my presentation about the topic „The idea and advantages of agile software development“, which I held during the second week in front of my teacher and Katja.

In the second week I got to know more people, who are working in many different roles. Mila gave me insights about her role as a Product Manager of “YellowPages“. Rodrigo inspired me with his activities to learn more about UI / UX design and Abdul held his session in German, especially for me, and gave me an introduction about how the METRO.digital newsletter is created.

I also joined the dailies of several teams and experienced how the team members communicated and collaborated in practice. The things I heard, observed and learned were very fascinating, but moreover there seems to be very nice people working for the company. Everyone was really nice and open minded and this made me feel less nervous and happy!

I am very glad that I did this internship! It is still open what profession I want to take after school. Before the internship I was interested in psychology and I learned now that there are so many jobs where it can be helpful to have knowledge in psychology. In METRO.digital for instance you need to understand the customer and you have to think like them. It also might be helpful during interactions within your team, to see things and problems from the perspective of colleagues.

Furthermore, I learned how agile methods are used in METRO and got inspired to use them also for myself. For example, to create a task board, doing reflections, giving feedback and so on. I will totally use this for my future. During the internship I also got some insights about how many different roles exist in such a big company, which is very impressive to me.

In the end I did not really eat sweets during my time here, but the inspirations for my life were much more fruitful – and in terms of physical health, the curry sausage with fries I had every day in the canteen did the job very well.