FROM TRAINEE TO A TEAM LEADER

Very early during his training, Benjamin Simon realized what was particularly important to him in his job: interacting with people on a regular basis. "Even back then, I enjoyed answering the phone, talking to customers and helping them as best I could, much more than taking on purely administrative tasks, for example," says Simon.

It was therefore probably no coincidence that he was offered a job as a sales clerk after completing his training. At the same time, he began a part-time course of study in "International Management," which he successfully completed in 2015. At this time, Simon also made the definite step into sales. There, he was initially responsible for the first customer projects and at the same time gained insights into purchasing topics such as import business, before he was able to serve one of Becker Stahl's largest customers as a Key Account Manager.

After his promotion to "Team Leader Sales" last year, many new strategic tasks and appointments have been added, for example when it comes to the optimizations of processes in logistics or the digitalization of sales channels. Nevertheless, Benjamin Simon identifies a constant in his daily work. "Interacting with our customers and suppliers is still what I enjoy the most. From my point of view, we are working in an exciting industry that is currently undergoing big changes. All in all, you deal with many nice contact persons, with whom you often go through long connections and who you then sometimes also get to know detached from the business. By exporting products abroad, you often come into contact with different cultures," says Simon.

The fact that there are always new impulses and thus new challenges is also what makes his job so appealing for him. "You can never sit back because you always have to look at how you can meet the new demands of the market," Simon reports." This is especially true in the current situation. The Corona pandemic has had a major impact on supply chains in the steel industry, causing steel supply to shrink significantly. The very limited availability is also making itself felt at Becker Stahl, so that the company itself is having to deal with bottlenecks in some cases. The challenge for Benjamin Simon and his team is then to keep calm and explain the situation to the customer as openly and honestly as possible and find solutions.

Benjamin Simon is also aware that it is rather exceptional nowadays to still be working in the same company 10 years after the completion of his apprenticeship. Accordingly, he looks back on his time at Becker Stahl: "Of course, the tasks are demanding, but if you are performance-oriented and inquisitive, you have great opportunities for further development, especially as a young colleague. In response to the final question about what he remembers most from his time at the company so far, Simon mentions the team spirit and explains, "the colleagues help each other out, nobody lets anyone down. There is a reason we say we are one big Becker family“.