Melanie Siems
Head of Department Environment International
Your Career at Fichtner
We are looking for people with energy! Become part of an engineering and consulting company with a successful history stretching back more than 100 years. In the Fichtner Group, you can expect a unique combination of a long-term oriented family business coupled with diversity, dynamism and flat hierarchies.
For a geoscientist like me, Fichtner GmbH & Co. KG may not seem like an obvious employer at first glance. After graduating in geoecology at the University of Bayreuth, I first worked as a project manager at an expert company for contaminated site remediation in North Rhine-Westphalia, where I dealt with soil and groundwater contamination on old industrial sites.
My desire to tackle larger and international projects then led me to Fichtner in 2012. At Fichtner, I initially worked in the field of environmental and permit engineering for power line and power plant projects in German-speaking countries. This was increasingly followed by projects outside of Europe, in which we carry out environmental impact studies in the energy sector for our clients. Since projects in third-world countries are often financed by international development banks, they must comply with high environmental and social standards. These are also monitored by on-site inspections of construction sites, which took me all the way to the other end of the world, namely to Chile, on my very first overseas business trip.
The next adventurous step in my career then began in mid-2015. I was posted to Lilongwe, Malawi, for three and a half years, where I was the on-site leader of the interdisciplinary team responsible for ensuring compliance with environmental, social, and occupational health & safety standards during construction supervision of the largest electrification project in Malawi. Implementing such a project in a team consisting of both local and international experts in one of the poorest countries in the world left a lasting impression on me.
Back in Germany in 2019, I initially took over as team coordinator and deputy section leader for the South 3 section of the SuedLink infrastructure project, a 700 km cable route running across Germany.
Since the beginning of 2022, I’ve now been head of the Environment International department in the Renewable Energies and Environment business division and can once again devote myself entirely to international clients and projects.
