Biography | Klaus Zellmer — The Automotive Degree on This Neckar Slope

People treat a Volkswagen Group career as if it begins at Zuffenhausen.

The first professional address on the official curriculum is a small applied university above the Neckar.

Volkswagen and Škoda biographies record a degree in business administration, then three years from 1994 at the Institute for Automotive Economics at the Nürtingen-Geislingen University of Applied Sciences.

The pin is the HfWU city campus on Neckarsteige in Nürtingen, the public slope a visitor can stand on.

The institute's later letterhead sits at Parkstraße 4 in Geislingen, the second campus of the same Hochschule.

He later told a Porsche Club audience that he had chosen Geislingen on purpose for its new automotive-marketing track, even though the town itself was not Hamburg or Munich.

That is paraphrase, not a courtroom transcript.

From here he went, in 1997, to Porsche as assistant to the board member for sales and marketing.

The later Leipzig, Atlanta and Mladá Boleslav titles sit on this first industry desk.

Photo: Wnme, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons