GROW participant finds many sides to Stockholm both on and off the job during three months in Sweden.
In Munich, Anna Kerler works for Buch- und Mediendienst at Bonnier Media Deutschland where she deals with a lot of data on book sales for the publishing houses arsEdition, Carlsen and Thienemann. But for the past three months, she was in Stockholm in the GROW program, working first at online sales company Bink and then at book publisher Bonnierförlagen.
At Bink, although the job was quite different from her work in Germany, there were some parallels in that at both it was about finding sales arguments and utilizing knowledge of customers fully. At Bonnierförlagen, even if it was the same industry, Kerler ended up working on a quite different project: setting up a Pinterest account for the publisher that would show the history of the venerable publishing house. “I had access to the archive and I got to see a lot of old and new photographs there!” she says.
Kerler had a very unusual situation in that halfway through her GROW time, Bink was dissolved and she had to decide where she would continue her time. “I was afraid that I would have to leave Stockholm six weeks earlier,” she says. But she was given several options and she chose to go to Bonnierförlagen. “For me it was a great chance to see how the publishing houses work in Sweden – and of course at Bonnierförlagen it’s all about books and this is where my heart is.”
Despite the change halfway, Kerler says the experience was great. “It’s such an amazing chance you get from your employer that you don’t want to miss!” she says. “Where else do you have the possibility to go abroad for three months, work there, get to know another country, another culture, another way of life and of work, a new company (in my case it was even two), new people, achieve new language skills, keep your job at home and get so much support for it from both sides, from your host company and your company at home? I can only recommend this kind of exchange to everyone who has the opportunity to do it.”
And she’ll be missing plenty from Stockholm, from new friends to the great interior design everywhere, not to mention boats out into the Stockholm Archipelago. “It was a great experience to see how different you spend your leisure time when you are abroad,” says Kerler. “You do a lot more things like going to a museum, doing some sightseeing, trying restaurants or cafés, etc. You should really try to take some of that back home and not get stuck into the daily routine as usual.”