Name: Jonathan Budez Vergara
Track: Finance/ Risk
Studied: Sustainable Energy Technology
Trainee year: 2020
Non-financial background
As a recent graduate, you always have a lot of expectations. The first step in your career is very important, you want that job that ticks all the boxes. In my case, the Traineeship in Finance and Risk ticks all of those boxes. As a Sustainable Energy Professional from TUDelft, I wanted a job that fulfils not only professional expectations but also personal motivation. On one hand, I wanted to develop my technical skills from my background in engineering while learning about project management. On the other hand, I wanted to work for a company with a meaningful business that thinks towards a more sustainable future. I have always been curious about the Finance industry, however, I had little knowledge about the insurance sector, so I decided to attend a NN event.
Drop by NN – Coffee Event
I got to know NN during a coffee event. There I met lots of young, intelligent, and enthusiastic trainees from all the different tracks: Finance and Risk, Investments and General Management. Since my interests were oriented to Finance and Risk, I was assigned a “buddy” from that track. He shared with me all of his experiences during his traineeship. I found the atmosphere of the company and the traineeship cohort extremely welcoming. The great variety in assignments made me realize that the learning opportunities at NN were abundant. My “buddy” was working on the implementation of a desktop application for internal purposes. This last assignment got my attention a lot, since it seemed like the perfect combination of project management and technical skills. Fortunately, there was a vacancy for an intern in the department: Sparklab, which is a segment of Finance Strategy. A few weeks later I applied for the internship.
Internship
During my internship at NN, I had the chance to get to know the company much better. Additionally, the opportunity to work next to a trainee gave a great overview of the traineeship. We started working on a project related to the NN innovation method. The objective was to build an application that stimulates innovation within NN on the Power Apps platform. At that time, I did not have any knowledge about using Power Apps, however, I was impressed by the number of people at NN willing to help. I also had the chance to earn the CFA Institute Investment Foundations certificate, which helped me to understand different concepts related to Finance that I was not familiar with. The spirit of collaboration, together with the incredible opportunities that NN provides, inspired me the most to apply for a traineeship.
Traineeship
I am currently a first-year trainee in Finance and Risk. My assignment is in Finance Performance and Analytics, which is responsible to steer, monitor, and control the financial processes of the Business Units. More specifically, I am supporting the International Business Units. I have the opportunity to get directly involved in the analysis of the financials of the company. I am also in contact with different stakeholders, which means not only that I learn from the content of the assignment, but also from all the expertise of the people around me. Gaining this knowledge about Finance is not the only thing I enjoy about my assignment though. Something else I really value is the opportunity to be independent and innovative. Currently, I am working on the creation of a digital dashboard to display the financial and non-financial KPIs from the Business Units more efficiently. I have the chance to shape the assignment independently, which is very valuable to me. For all these reasons, even though I don’t have a finance background, I am sure that this traineeship has been a great choice for me. Are you curious to know more? Feel free to contact me on my LinkedIn or at Jonathan.Enrique.Budez.Vergara@nn-group.com.
