Jonas, Project Manager

What educational/academic background do you have?
M.Sc. Mechanical Engineering
M.Sc. Industrial Engineering
Dr.-Ing. (in progress)

Why did you decide to go into consulting?
I wanted to work on challenging projects that enable me to learn new things:
A specialization in R&D topics, such as in aerospace engineering, would have meant that you spend, say, 20 years of your career optimizing a single part, like a turbine blade.
I wanted to focus on new problems/topics every couple of months across many industries. During my studies, I saw something of aerospace, but there are many more industries.
During my time as a consultant, I realized that production and especially automation across all industries is my passion. Roland Berger/consulting enables you to find this.

What is or has been the biggest challenge for you in consulting?
Learning to work with assumptions and applying an 80/20 approach, where sufficient. As a mechanical engineer you tend to analyze everything to the last detail.

How can you use your skills at Roland Berger?
My skills enable me to bridge the gap between technical people/engineers on the client side and business people/management. Furthermore, I can translate between different corporate silos, e.g. IT, production, finance.

What did you learn that you will never need here?
I learned how to approximate solutions to differential equations with pen and paper.

Which of your skills from your background makes your consulting life easier?
Solving highly complex problems where you do not even understand the problem description when you read it for the first time. The key competency you learn in (mechanical) engineering is problem solving. Understanding the topics of mechanics, thermodynamics, etc. is secondary.

What did you want to be as a child and what would you love to be today if you weren't a consultant?
At one point in my childhood, a pilot. Or I would have founded a startup developing solutions to digitalize production. Unfortunately, I am highly risk averse...

How does your team benefit from your skills?
I can quickly understand highly technical and complex problems and abstract them to efficiently solve them within the project team.

What has been your favorite moment/project since you joined Roland Berger as a consultant?
We designed and implemented a process automation solution for a client's highly critical business process after their internal project suffered more than a year of delay, despite the fact that this was not in our original project scope. It was nice to see how our team was able to support the client where it was most needed and that we were able to also focus on implementation whenever it was required.