9 January 2025
In 2023, Maarten Meiners made an important decision: he stepped away from his international sports career and changed course completely. When ABN AMRO offered him the opportunity to learn a new profession, he jumped at the chance.
From young champion to world-class skier
Maarten provides loans to corporates in the Digital, Consumer, and Food sectors. But not so long ago, he was on the slopes in Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympics. There, he represented the Netherlands as the nation’s first alpine skier in seventy years, finishing in eighteenth place. “I started skiing at a young age,” he says. “The mountains, the adrenaline – I loved everything about it. As I got better, I started racing. From junior competitions I worked my way up to junior world championships, always with one goal in mind: the Olympic Games.”
Planning for the future
“Even at the height of my athletic career, I always kept up my schooling. That was important to me, because I knew this wouldn’t last forever. Technically I was a full-time student, but from October to March I was abroad a lot of the time. I could catch up on exams from that period during the retakes in June. In the end, my studies took a bit longer than usual, but I'm very grateful I got my Bachelor's degree.”
Unexpected turn
A year after the Olympics, Maarten bid his sports career farewell. “I wasn’t sure how much further I could still progress, and I felt ready for a new challenge. I gave myself plenty of time to explore different options, to find the right fit. While doors seemed to open everywhere, I often lost out to people with relevant internship and work experience – which I didn't have. Although I had plenty of life experience, that alone usually wasn’t enough. ABN AMRO was different, they saw my drive. They recognised that I'd developed all the relevant soft skills through my sports career, and knew that the hard skills could be taught.”
Trial and error
“If I've learned one thing from top-tier sports, it's that you shouldn't dwell too long on things you can't change. You either win or you learn. When you look at it that way, setbacks are actually very valuable. That's why I always believed I would eventually find the right job. And sure enough, after I started my Master's in Business Administration, a connection led me to ABN AMRO. I couldn’t be happier about how things turned out. The bank's culture immediately appealed to me – people here are all about action and getting things done.”
New adventures
Maarten has been here for six months now. “I've had incredibly good support in my onboarding at ABN AMRO. First and foremost from my buddy, an experienced team member who showed me the ropes at the bank and who I could go to whenever I had questions. But the training and education programme has also helped me enormously. There are various e-learning courses, to get to know ABN AMRO's systems and the financial world. For example, I took a two-day accounting course where I learned to better understand and analyse figures. And next year, I'm starting a seven-day credit training programme. It took me a while to find my feet, especially as I didn’t have conventional work experience. Luckily, everyone is very helpful so I’ve gotten into the swing of things now – and that feels great.”
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