Cagri’s First Hand Report (Home Country)

My name is Cagri. I have been working at real,- Group Holding GmbH since May 6th 2009 as an international trainee. I am happy to be a member of this programme, since I have the opportunity to work in such an energetic environment and experience it in an international atmosphere.

I have already finished my 6th month in my home country, which is Turkey, before I move in to my host country. I spent 3 months mainly at a real,- Store in Turkey. In the first week of my training I did the administrative paperwork and was introduced to essentials of the hypermarket business in Turkey. Afterwards I worked as an employee in all of the store’s departments. There was no boring day at all since this was a continuously moving new world. I did everything as an employee, served the customers and also worked together with the management team of the store.

In the meantime I also had the opportunity to participate in 3 new store openings in Turkey, where I worked together with the store management. Being part of the store management during new store openings was very enjoyable since we worked in teams and I was responsible for the coordination between different departments. 

In the last 3 months I worked at real,- Turkey headquarters in Istanbul. There I worked in different categories, where I saw how the assortments are planned according to customer needs. It was also quite important to work at category management since I was able to observe links between stores and categories.

During my training I was also sent to Düsseldorf, Warsaw and Moscow for 3 seminar weeks. There I met the other trainees and we as a group had different soft-skills trainings. We also started to work on a project in order to gain more experience of working as an international group and enhancing our analytical thinking skills.

I improved my practical experience and soft skills a lot looking back at my first 6 months. I also got to know many real,- colleagues from different countries. It makes me feel happy and safe to know that I made a perfect choice to join the ITP program.