Traineeship Project Management Consultant

Your traineeship at Cleopatra Enterprise

Empowering companies across the globe to improve their project performance. That’s what you will be doing as a trainee at Cleopatra Enterprise: the market leader in total cost management technology. During your one-year traineeship, you will learn all about our field, our way of working, and the smart software solutions we offer our clients. Experience in the area of cost engineering is, therefore, not a prerequisite. Through training, close guidance, and on-the-job learning, you will, with your technical background, grow into a cost consultancy professional in no time.

Why you want to be a trainee at Cleopatra Enterprise

You have accumulated a wealth of technical knowledge during your studies, but you want to develop yourself on a broader scale. Or perhaps you already have some technical work experience and are looking for a new challenge. If so, this traineeship might be just the thing for you. At Cleopatra Enterprise, you will be working at the interface of finance and technology. Based on your affinity with engineering and your technical background, you will actively help customers in the chemical, offshore, mining, renewable energy and other industries make cost estimates for business cases. And by helping clients keep their projects on schedule and budget, you will improve your project management skills.

Your development comes first

What development paths you can take during your traineeship is something we deliberately will not address in great detail here. We want you to go into this with an open mind and discover for yourself what your passion and ambitions are, and not give you the feeling that you ‘have to’ choose a certain development direction right from the start. For us, your professional and personal development comes first. Throughout your traineeship, our focus will not only be on expertise, but also on soft skills. You and your mentor will together determine which skills you want to develop. There is also the option to bring in a coach to help you figure out in what area you want to develop. Once that is clear, you and your mentor will chart a course towards achieving your goal(s). We offer the right breeding ground and resources to enable you to grow.

Your traineeship in 5 steps

1. It all starts with an intensive training programme of roughly four weeks at the Cost Engineering Academy. During this programme, you will learn everything you need to know about cost engineering, our services, and our cost control software tool called Cleopatra Enterprise.
2. Got all the basic theoretical knowledge down? Great! The next step is to choose the right competence centre for you. Each centre has its own onboarding programme.
3. Once we have selected a centre together, a senior colleague will guide you through the onboarding programme. By joining in on various projects and never ceasing to ask questions, you will learn all about the field in no time.
4. Once you have achieved the goals you set, your traineeship ends. But your development doesn’t stop there! Together, we will go over your options for further development. If you want to gain broader knowledge and experience, you can choose to switch to one of the other competence centres. You will then not have to go through the whole onboarding programme again, as we’ll let you pick out the parts you can learn more about.
5. If you have found your niche, your days as a trainee will have come to an end and we will start a new phase. That said, we will keep encouraging you to continue to grow, both on a professional and on a personal level. You can, for example, make a personal development plan within the performance management framework. And you will have the option to take further training in areas such as project management.

In order to continue to develop and grow, it is important that you have a solid foundation. This is why we give trainees a standard package with excellent employment terms and conditions.

Excellent compensation and benefits package

• A starting gross monthly salary of €2,800 if you have a bachelor’s degree and €3,000 if you have a master’s degree or a science degree.
• Once you have really found your niche and your performance is good, you will have the prospect of growing to a gross monthly salary of €4,650 after 5 years of service.
• A performance-related annual bonus that can run up to €1,500 before tax in the first year.
• 29,5 days of holiday leave entitlement to help you maintain a good work-life balance.
• A competitive pension plan where we will pay half of your premium.
• A company laptop.

But there is more

• Flexible working hours and the option to work from home part of the time.
• Opportunities to grow your network.
• Scope to take initiative and responsibility in your development and projects, based on the trust we put in you.
• Possible international travel for work.
• Great colleagues from all over the world, who will gladly have lunch with you, enjoy a BBQ with drinks on the roof terrace, or play a game of table football or darts.
• A social committee that regularly organises fun outings, including a skiing trip.
• A corporate culture where pitching and implementing new ideas is highly appreciated.
• We will aim to pair you up with at least one fellow trainee to share your experiences with.

This traineeship is for you if you...

• have a bachelor’s or master’s degree from university or are about to graduate, preferably a technology-related or engineering-related degree.
• affinity with technology and project management.
• speak and write good English.
• are curious and enterprising.
• are allowed to work in the Netherlands at least in your first year. We can help you apply for a subsequent visa, if necessary.

How things work at Cleopatra Enterprise

Passion makes perfect. This one-liner features in giant letters on the wall of our Zwijndrecht office. And with good reason, because from day one you will notice that your colleagues are passionate about what they do, relish every opportunity to share their knowledge with you, and are themselves still eager to learn. What will probably also strike you about our office is the lack of doors. We have adopted an open-door policy. Your colleagues – who are mainly engineers and software developers – are approachable, open, helpful, and passionate.

We set the bar high in our work, but we still stay informal and actively seek collaboration. Precisely by harnessing our individual differences in terms of character, expertise, and background, we achieve more. At our company, you will be working with colleagues from as many as 16 nationalities. What we are also proud of as a company operating in the engineering domain: 25% of our workforce is female. At Cleopatra Enterprise, everyone is welcome and everyone can be themselves. And that’s not just words, as our employees actually feel it that way thanks to our corporate culture!

Let’s get introduced!

Hopefully, you are now just as excited about this trainee programme as we are. Are you? Great, then it’s now time that we get introduced. Here’s how:

1. Our recruiter Bram Rouppé will contact you and tell you all about our organisation and go over the details of the traineeship with you. The idea behind this call is to find out if the programme is right for you.
2. If it is, the next step will be the first round of interviews at our office:

• 45 minutes with one of our recruiters, i.e. Bram or Nick, and a consultant.
• 45 minutes with a member of our management team and a senior consultant.

1. Depending on what is a good fit for you, you will be given information on and access to our in-house developed software tool Cleopatra. You will be asked to prepare a presentation based on that information. Or you will be sent a data case and asked to work it out at home and return it to us by email.
2. Then there is the second round of interviews:

• Depending on what assignment you were given, this is when you discuss your analysis of the data case or give the presentation you prepared about part of our Cleopatra software to the management team.
• You will be asked to pitch yourself to us, explaining what role you think you can fulfil at Cleopatra Enterprise and what you want to develop into.

1. If after all of this we are both convinced, we will make you an offer for you to sign. And then your adventure as a trainee can start!