The 32-year-old, who was born in Kyiv, sees herself as a pioneer for equal opportunities and social diversity in Germany.
Dusseldorf Clean tiles, the smell of detergent and lots of snow-white sinks – that’s Natalya Nepomnyashcha’s first memory of Germany. It is March 6, 2001. She and her parents stop at a shopping center in Dresden to wash up. The day before, the three had left Ukraine for Germany in a coach.
Your image of Germany? “That everything is orderly, clean and right,” says the 32-year-old in the podcast “Handelsblatt Rethink Work”. “A bit of a land of milk and honey.”
At that time she had no idea how hard it would be for her in her new home. In Kyiv she was a model student, in Augsburg, where she arrives with her family, she is an eleven-year-old girl who doesn’t speak a word of German, lives in a “ghetto district” and lives on Hartz IV. Her parents couldn’t help her. “You had to find your own way,” she says. They are still unemployed and hardly integrated. She has come to terms with that, according to Nepomnyashcha.
Natalya Nepomnyashcha in an interview about diversity in Germany
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At the age of 13 she went to the dean of the neighboring high school on her own initiative and asked if she could go there after the holidays. After all, she’s one of the best at secondary school, and she definitely wants to do her Abitur and study. “He laughed at me,” she says. “Of course that had a huge impact on me.” She thinks that the multi-tier school system should be abolished and that everyone in the school should be encouraged individually. This is the only way to create equal educational opportunities.
When she is 17, she moves out of her home. Against the will of her parents and without money, but with a precise plan in mind how and where she can still study without a high school diploma. She manages “over 300 detours” the master’s degree in England.
Back in Germany, she goes to Berlin “totally naive” in the hope of finding a job in political consulting – in vain. Once, she says, they told her to her face that they wouldn’t hire her because nobody could pronounce her name. “I shed a lot of tears because I was really afraid of becoming as long-term unemployed as my parents.”
What drove her? “I’ve always had a strong need for justice and I really wanted to be successful,” says Nepomnyashcha. And: “I was ashamed.”
Founder of Network Opportunities is committed to social advancement
Today Natalya Nepomnyashcha is 32 years old, a management consultant at EY and the founder of Network Opportunities. The start-up is committed to equal opportunities and social advancement in Germany, because diversity is “not sexy” for companies because it is not visible to the outside world. After all, you don’t see whether there are social climbers among the white men on board pictures.
Nonetheless, Nepomnyashcha believes that the opportunities for social advancement in Germany have increased somewhat over the years, mainly because of the skills shortage. But she also thinks that “we all as a society still have a lot of work to do on our education system and on companies opening up more and trying to be open to all kinds of CVs, stories and people”.
More: You can hear the previous episode of Handelsblatt Rethink Work here.