Working at Fagro

My name is Maxim van den Akker, I’m 24 years old and was born and raised in a small village called Budel. I’ve been living in Tilburg since 2013 and share a student house with 4 friends and my girlfriend, all of which play at the football club TSVV Merlijn (or soccer if you don’t know what the proper terminology is). If you’ve been on or around Merlijn’s pitch you’ll probably have seen me as I would spend most of my days there.

What did you do during your student years?

After my “VWO” degree I started a bachelor study in business economics. After traveling back and forth home for a year I decided to get a room on my own and started integrating and networking in Tilburg’s student life (read: drink beer and have fun). During my studies I’ve done board years and committees combined with the University’s Honors Program and a couple of side jobs. After my Bachelor’s I started and finished a Master’s degree in Finance. (which takes some getting used to since you don’t have Bob van den Brand for half the lectures anymore.)

 “Therefore I tried looking for something that gave me a variety of insights; a job in which you’ll be able to see a great amount of different companies as well as experiencing different kinds of work.”

My job search.

During my Master’s degree it started to get to me that the great life I was living was coming to an end. As almost every student I started looking for possible jobs after defending my thesis. I went to multiple inhouse days, the EBT, case days and all the other possibilities. The case studies provided gave me a sense of where I did not want to end up at. Unfortunately, it did not give me a sense of where I actually want to go. Therefore I tried looking for something that gave me a variety of insights; a job in which you’ll be able to see a great amount of different companies as well as experiencing different kinds of work. All this in order to know what direction I wanted to give my future career. I knew that one of my former teammates used to work as interim financial, which sounded like a nice option for my indecisiveness. So I went looking for companies that were in the interim field, one of them was Fagro.

Why Fagro?

When looking for a great employee I knew that I wouldn’t simply go to the first one to offer me a decent job. So I went to 3 companies and, fortunately, all 3 offered me a job. All three offers were quite comparable; a nice paycheck, a lease car and some nice secondary benefits. I had a good feeling about each and every one of them. However one of these three distinguished itself through something I did want to keep doing: learning. Fagro was the company that gave me the most possibilities to improve myself as a professional. This growth opportunity, together with the fact that Fagro tried to look not only at one’s capabilities, but also whether or not the interviewee was a match as a person, made me choose for them.

My current project.

At the moment I’m doing a project for Equipe Zorgbedrijven. It is a private healthcare company which specializes in a couple of fields such as: dermatology, plastic surgery, hand operations and a lot more. The company is expanding quite rapidly, plus they also switched to a new software program. Due to this they needed some extra help to get the administration in order. The first month I had to learn about the software and solve issues which came up during the implementation phase. After this I spend some extra months upgrading the way of administration to be more efficient as well as supporting with the month end close. When doing this I was in contact with secretaries spread over 12 different locations. After finishing that project something new came across; a new company was bought, however it did not make the profits it was supposed to. Right now I’m working to gain insights about the fact that the company does not deliver what was expected. This time the project specializes more on business control and data analysis, as well as reporting issues and solving them. The nice thing is that I was able to do two jobs in the same company of which the latter one proved to be more challenging, giving me a bigger step upwards compared to when one remains a long time on the same function.

 “When it comes to jobs: try to do as many case studies as possible, they give a good impression about the real work.”

A word of advice.

First of all: enjoy your student life. Make the most out of it. Do board years, committees, sports, drink and don’t set alarms. When it comes to jobs: try to do as many case studies as possible, they give a good impression about the real work. When looking for a job: don’t settle for your minimum if that turns out to be easily found. There are, especially in the time we’re living in, so many great jobs to do, try to get a couple of offers and weigh the pros and cons carefully before making a decision. Plus: the life after graduating isn’t too bad, you’ve got less spare time, but more money to do whatever you like on your days off.

For questions, comments or a simple chat you can always hit me up on Linkedin.