Facilities @ Management

2.20 How Did I Get Into Facility Management?

Jürgen Schneider

As with most facility management executives of my generation, an FM career was not the original master plan I had set out to do as a young academic. This was not so much due to the image of facility management, but rather to the perception of the industry and its importance, which was still insufficient for me at the time. At that time, I probably simply wouldn’t have been able to do anything with the term facility management. But even today, I still meet people who mistakenly associate the term with “janitorial” rather than the management of buildings, properties and operational processes in the operational phase.

“What you can earn with your head, you don’t have to do with your hands” was what my father, who was a craftsman, had given me on my training path at the time. At that point in time, it was not foreseeable that the work would catch up with me and that I would enjoy the management of technical facility services. Today, more than 30 years later, I am the managing director of gefma, the largest association for facility management in Germany with over 1,000 member companies. What happened?

Like many university graduates with a commercial degree, I chose a renowned international consulting firm to start my career. Good listening and analysis and a high degree of flexibility characterized the way I worked, and I noticed that I particularly liked the interaction with the people in my job. Translating customer ...