Recognizing her own passion for human resources at an early stage, Soumia specialized in business, work and social psychology topics during her psychology studies. She also worked for several years in various national and international HR departments at REWE Group, most recently as an HR expert and innovation officer in Executive Learning. She has gained expertise and experience in designing group-wide talent development programs, especially for executives below top management, and understands the impact of a volatile external environment on internal change needs.

Thinking about collaboration, leadership, talent acquisition, development and retention in a new and agile way and using innovative tools to make the world of work a little bit better – all of this excites Soumia immensely and, in her view, holds great opportunities to synergistically develop the potential of individuals with that of organizations. She likes to draw on the repertoire of methods used in agile innovation management and firmly believes in the power of the community. In her role as innovation officer at REWE Group, Soumia had her first contact with the agile method Design Thinking, which fascinated her so much that she is currently also taking a closer look at agile methods and ways of working in research and teaching. As a doctoral candidate at the University of Duisburg-Essen, she is focusing on the human side of innovation and exploring ways to support virtually collaborating teams in their creative problem-solving processes with design thinking.

In projects with customers, Soumia is keen to contribute her practical experience as well as the latest scientific studies. A key guiding principle of her work is to develop new solutions for customized management and collaboration structures in a co-creative way, without losing sight of the holistic view of transformation processes.