New Honorary Professor at Leuphana: Niels Bosse

Currently, the doctor of economics has been working as managing director in the areas of human resources and organization at Audi Mexico for a good two and a half years. The 47-year-old has been associated with Lüneburg since he was a student: After completing his training as an industrial clerk, Bosse studied business law at the then Lüneburg University of Applied Sciences. He then joined Volkswagen in 2001 as part of his diploma thesis.

Four years later, the then 30-year-old moved to Volkswagen Financial Services and decided to pursue a doctorate while working. The topic of his doctoral thesis was the job-family structure approach: should employees be recruited not only on the basis of their professional expertise, but also on the basis of their competencies and processes? "If you need someone for the IT area, for example, people don't usually look in the human resources area, even though information technicians are also employed there. So if you search for potential employees in a competency-oriented way, it opens up completely different possibilities for finding employee potential and shaping career paths," explains the economist.

After completing his doctorate, Niels Bosse moved abroad for the first time in August 2011 to pursue his career: initially as HR manager for Volkswagen Finance China, he then moved to Volkswagen Group China in 2013 and took on the role of HR manager at the headquarter. After almost four years in Beijing, Niels Bosse returned to Germany at the end of 2015 to take on the HR management role for one of the large production areas at the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, which comprises around 10 thousand employees. In June 2019, he assumed his current position, for which he moved to Mexico. "Working internationally means not only the international career, but also intercultural understanding," Bosse emphasizes.

He is pleased to have taken up the honorary professorship: "As a student, I always appreciated experiencing people from the field and discussing things with them, so I want to give a bit back." For this reason, he said, he wants to focus primarily on teaching in the coming period. Since completing his studies, he has been a regular guest lecturer at Leuphana, offering various courses, most recently on global leadership. He has also come to appreciate various collaborative projects at Leuphana, such as the Cultural Change Project, which was carried out last semester with two master's students. He would also like to work in such fields in the future.