The digital nomad
She was born in Vienna, played football for St. Pauli and loves sailing trips. Since the end of 2023, Michaela Seidl has been touring Europe to advance the cause of international project management at TÜV NORD CERT.
When you talk to Michaela Seidl on the phone or meet her via Teams, it’s advisable to ask where she is at that moment: She might be in Hamburg, Vienna, Cologne, Bologna or Eindhoven – her location can change every week. She might just have returned to Hamburg from the Netherlands, only to be taking off for the UK again just one week later. Having worked for many years in international project management at TÜV NORD CERT in Hamburg and taken care of major customers, she has now been on the road as a digital nomad in business development for almost a year, sharing her experience with the European subsidiaries to further expand the international project management business.
She always travels light for her work, just carrying a laptop, a tablet and a dark blue notebook. She never goes anywhere without her “juke box”, which constantly plays classic rock sounds, as she says with a laugh. Queen, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen are the bands she feels most at ease with. With an Austrian father and a Bulgarian mother, both logisticians, she was practically born to be an international traveller. She likes people and encounters – and it’s been in the TÜV NORD world, above all, where extraordinary encounters have opened doors for her.
During her studies, Michaela worked in the accounting department of a company in Vienna, where an auditor from TÜV NORD was also working. “I’d just come back from Hawaii with a tan in January and was sitting in the office in ripped jeans. I asked her if she knew of anywhere abroad that I might be able to work.” That’s how her relationship with Hamburg came about, along with a student job for six months. As her boss at the time said afterwards: “Take your laptop with you to Vienna and finish your studies – and then come back.” She continued to work for TÜV NORD from Vienna and relocated completely to Hamburg after her studies. And so it was that six months became eleven years. “Even though I like travelling a lot, I still have a tendency to put down roots,” says Michaela. “I really appreciate the opportunity to work in the Group as a digital nomad. I know this can’t be taken for granted. But I’m also passionate about the work and the company.”
Organising and coordinating are where she is most at home. Michaela and her colleagues know the processes of system certification like the back of their hands. “We hit on the idea of sharing our know-how with the other companies – starting with the Western Europe cluster at the moment – to give them the skills to take on or acquire their own major customers and manage them properly,” Michaela says in her typical Viennese dialect. To make dialogue easier, she has created a shared basis for communication with her colleagues, consisting of SharePoint and monthly meetings with a team from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. “We have so many cool people who have loads to give each other.”
In 2018, another chance encounter in a TÜV NORD lift led to her joining the FC St. Pauli women’s football team. “I was in the lift with a colleague from the academy, who said to me, ‘You look like you can play football. Would you like to play for St. Pauli?'” She needed no second invitation; after all, Michaela had grown up with football. She had previously played for Wiener Sportclub and made it into the U15 and U17 Austrian national teams as a goalkeeper. Even though she had to stop playing football in 2022 after a serious back injury, she’s still grateful to her colleague today. Now she has discovered sailing as her go-to sport for wellbeing and enjoys relaxing on extended trips on the Baltic Sea around Föhr and off the coast of Denmark.
We’re all colleagues who see eye to eye and can learn a lot from each other.
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In 2020, Michaela Seidl played in the women’s FC St. Pauli football team
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Training in the Millerntor Stadium
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Michaela’s feel-good place: Sailing on the Baltic Sea on the way to Grömitz
She loves numbers and describes herself as an “Excel freak”. In 2023, she visited the UK branch several times, where she created a forecasting tool to improve the ease and efficiency of capacity planning. She designed training materials and trained her colleagues in various topics. This year, she has spent several months at sites in Italy and the Netherlands and been in the UK on a weekly basis, helping her local colleagues move major customers over to “systematic” customer service. “Overall, I’ve had a super-warm welcome and have quickly felt part of the teams. But I’m sure I also get on a lot of people’s nerves because I sometimes move too fast,” she says. However, she never loses sight of the matter in hand and always treats other people with respect. Her focus is on seeing what the biggest problems are in key account management and working out how these can be solved. When she arrives anywhere, Michaela brings ideas and functioning processes with her. In return, she also takes ideas from the foreign subsidiaries back to Germany. “We’re all colleagues who see eye to eye and can learn a lot from each other,” says the 32-year-old. For her, it’s a fundamental matter of principle that the various companies should come together as TÜV NORD and share information and knowledge in all directions. “Every individual has something to add to ensure that we all benefit from each other throughout the Group and become even more international.” She sometimes comes up against self-imposed boundaries, like language barriers. These she knows from her own experience. She openly admits to having had to overcome her shyness about using her school English every day in her professional life. “Language is there to help us communicate. And if it works, in the end it doesn’t matter if you make 50 mistakes.”
Dinner with colleagues in Bologna at “Nonna Rosa”, where it’s said you can eat the best cotoletta alla bolognese.
During her stay in Bologna, colleagues became friends.
Michaela has made many new friendships in European companies, which she continues to cultivate. And she has discovered the best ice cream shop in the world: “I love ice cream, and Gianni in Bologna has the best. Last time, I went out for ice cream every day,” she says, laughing. When she gets back from the UK, she will return to Bologna. But this time in a private capacity – before she heads off to the USA. But that will have to wait for the next instalment of the story of the digital nomad from TÜV NORD CERT.
