On track for growth with a new management team

ITK Engineering aims to more than double the employee headcount at the Ruelzheim location in five years’ time.

Ruelzheim – Bernd Gohlicke, 46, is a new member of the management board of ITK Engineering, a Rülzheim-based tech company. In this position, he is responsible for Technology and Development and heads up Automotive Products. Gohlicke plans to continue expanding ITK Engineering in a joint effort with company founder and CEO Michael Englert. The number of employees at the firm’s headquarters in Rülzheim, a town in Germany’s southern Palatinate region, is to increase from 400 at present to 1,000 over the next five years. To this end, a new facility with office and laboratory space is being built on the plot adjoining the headquarters in Rülzheim’s Nord II industrial estate. The firm aims to move into the new building in June 2018. Plans for a company cafeteria and further workspace in Rülzheim Nord III are also on the drawing board. Driven by advances in digitalization and connected systems, automated driving, and electric mobility, customer demand for ITK’s software and system development services is rising sharply.

The new Managing Director Bernd Gohlicke was born in the German town of Strausberg on January 19, 1972. After earning a degree in electrical engineering from Deutsche Telekom’s University of Applied Sciences in Berlin and gaining professional experience initially with Alcatel SEL in Stuttgart, he embarked on his career at Bosch in 2003 as a software development project manager. Further management positions in Germany and abroad followed. “Last year, I took on the responsibility for integrating ITK Engineering GmbH into the Bosch Engineering Group. In doing so, I was able to bring to bear the experience and knowledge gained over many years working for Bosch. I got to know ITK as an innovative and multifaceted company with highly motivated employees,” says Gohlicke.

President CEO of Bosch Engineering GmbH Bernhard Bihr ran ITK Engineering’s business jointly with Michael Englert on an interim basis during the integration process. Bihr handed over the management of ITK to Bernd Gohlicke on January 1, 2018. ITK Engineering GmbH will remain a discrete legal entity with its own brand.

All systems set for growth

The employee headcount at ITK Engineering GmbH, an international firm with ten branches in Germany and further subsidiaries in Austria, Spain, Japan, and the USA, currently stands at 1,100 and is rising steadily. “Demand for our software and system development services –for example, for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) for highly automated driving and for controlling state-of-the-art surgical robots –is rising. This is why we’re hiring 20 new employees a month on average,” says Michael Englert, founder and CEO of ITK Engineering. For the most part, the company is seeking college and university graduates and young professionals in the fields of electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, physics, and mathematics.