Meltwater employees are derived from a broad range of academic disciplines, including business administration, economics, cultural studies, journalism, law and even theology. In Germany this is very unusual, as it is common only to look for a job that relates to your education, just like it is standard for companies to only offer jobs to candidates with relevant educational backgrounds.

I studied Art History and after my master’s degree, I completed a PhD financed by a scholarship from the German Research Foundation. This educational focus reduced job opportunities rather than widened them. The only possible jobs I could find were within the cultural sector or at universities. Although I studied the arts, for family reasons I did not want to follow this academic career path – I wanted to make a change and start working in business. However, the possibilities to do so at the time seemed very limited in Germany.

What Meltwater offered me was further professional development, like a second education, and an opportunity to build the background that I was now interested in pursuing. The entry level Sales Consultant position is a training ground to build a foundation of business understanding and skills. I received a kind of crash course about the most important contexts of economic principles, including the answers to questions like: which internal structures do departments and subsidiaries of the biggest German companies have? What does a proper sales process look like - which aspects stimulate the negotiation process and which ones hinder the process? What is the…