Our students often take on mini-jobs alongside their studies. Zachary from Zimbabwe, one of our current BSc Accounting and Finance students, is gaining real-world skills beyond the classroom The work experience helps Zachary grow both personally and professionally while also providing extra income he can put to good use.
We visited Zachary at his work in Leipzig and got to speak with him and with his boss, Tore Waldhausen, the Co-Founder of R3LEAF – a company providing automated climate-risk intelligence from regenerative renovation concepts to sustainable implementation. Read the interview or watch the video to find out, if he is satisfied with the student’s contributions to his Accounting.
Tell us about your tasks at R3LEAF – what do you do at the company?
I help out of the bookkeeping, making sure that everything is taken care of on the financial side so that my bosses can focus on other things in detail. I make sure that every invoice is matched with every bank transaction in the bank account. I also handle some payroll calculations on the side for my boss as well, and help with checking missing invoices and quarterly VAT filings.
He’s helping me a lot with getting all the invoices together to have a good overview. It’s a lot of time that he saves me because there are more and more invoices coming in. I’m very thankful that he’s in the team right now! From the first day on, he was asking: ‘So what can I do? How can I help?’ He did a lot of effort on his own to add something to the things that we need.
How did your BSc Accounting and Finance studies at LU Leipzig prepare you for that work?
My studies at Lancaster, they gave me the foundations, and at work I got the practical example. So in my accounting work, I manag to apply the things I learned, such as variance analysis when I was doing analysis here for costs versus the budgeted cost. And it also helped me with financial statement analysis that I did in financial accounting.
What about the language barrier? Do you need good German skills?
Currently my German level is A1. In the team we mostly use English, but there are moments in which the statements that come from external advisors are in German, so I’ve been making use of translation apps. But in the process I’ve also learned some German terms. So when I look at a statement, I’m not as confused as I was when I started.
The communication with the text office is in German – they can’t speak English – and at some point I just know the German words and we need to translate them. This takes sometimes time. But the interesting thing is: Zachary is very good at using artificial intelligence. So this is quite interesting to realise how it can work, although the language barrier exists. He manages it pretty well and he’s also motivated to learn more German.
How much do you get paid and what do you use the money for, if we may ask?
I get paid a standard German hourly rate of €13. So based on how many hours I work my salary varies month by month. The money I’ve been earning here, I usually use when I go out with friends, and I’ve been saving most of it to finance a trip for myself as a little cheat for doing well at the end of summer.
I found Zachary on the job fair on campus, and it was very convenient to find him there! There were also a lot of other motivated students. So it was quite difficult to find out who fits best to our job, to the employee that we were looking for.
How does this work experience shape your career?
Throughout this work experience, it has helped me decide that I want to pursue accounting more, hopefully either in Germany or in Europe as well. Overall I have enjoyed my experience here. It has given me a platform of things I need to improve on as a person and as a professional as well.
