My time in Prague and at Peakforce is almost over yet it feels like I just got settled in. Just two months ago when I arrived I was assembling a standing fan from Slovak instructions, struggling to figure out what public transportation could bring me to my office, and not being able to get home without maps. Now I can easily tell what bus I need to take miles away from home or walk through the city with just landmarks and street names. I have even become a regular at local shops. Everyday for lunch I order the same thing and the workers begin preparing it for me as I walk in without even asking. I just wrapped up the longest going project of my internship but I feel like I only started it this week. Time seems to move much faster than normal when its filled with amazing experiences, new friends, and an abundance of information.
The project I was completing was demand intelligence research on the German market for expansion. I explored and ranked more than twenty German companies as outreach targets, sourced named decision makers, found direct contacts, and built multiple deliverables. The work forced me to get comfortable with German outreach law, including presumed consent rules and GDPR notice requirements. My supervisor pushed me to think about the legal and cultural line between useful contact and unwanted contact. This distinction helped me understand the market far more than I expected.
Success at a Czech company seems to be measured by whether your assignment actually got done and whether you can account for how it got done. It matters less how this occurs because I was always offered help and guidance through my supervisors. The main criteria was if I was actually proactive in my work and truly giving my best outputs. Czech professional culture seems to reward a quiet competence. You are expected to deliver, and you are expected to be honest about what worked and what did not. No one is ecstatic to give praise without effort. The result is the praise, in being able to have a sense of fulfillment in your work. What surprised me was how direct people are about problems.
At Peakforce, a successful employee owns their work start to finish and can explain every decision made inside it. You do not get credit for a nice looking deliverable if the analysis or research underneath it is wrong. The German outreach project made this concrete. My call map was only useful if the contacts were real, the legal framing held up, and the outreach angle made sense for each specific company. That meant checking a decision maker’s actual role, confirming a direct email, and writing an opening that respected German consent law. A sloppy version of that document would have looked identical from any other at a distance and been useless up close. Being an effective employee meant that you were closing that gap between looking done and being done.
Another trait that stood out to me was comfort with ambiguity. I was given outlines and overviews of different assignments yet my supervisors gave me complete control and trust on how I should attack a given problem. This even carried over to how I presented deliverables, mainly that I had put in true effort. I got a goal and a set of constraints, and the expectation was that I would figure out the path by myself. Asking smart questions was always welcome, but being handed the answer was not.
The clearest difference between Czech and American professional behavior is the relationship with self promotion. In the United States, part of being seen as successful is telling people you are successful. You update your LinkedIn, you boast your wins, and you speak up in meetings to be visible. I have done all of that, and I will keep doing it for fall recruiting. In Prague, that same behavior can read as insecure. Competence is assumed to speak for itself. When I finished the Germany deliverables, the response was brief and a new assignment was given with feedback to come. At first that felt cold, but by the end I understood it as trust. They did not need to celebrate the work because they expected it to be good. Communication style differs too. American workplaces give cushion on feedback and interject criticism between compliments. Czech feedback is flatter and faster. You hear what is wrong, you fix it, and you move on. Once I stopped reading the bluntness as disapproval, I instantly got better at completing assignments because the signal was clear.
I am leaving Prague more direct, more comfortable saying “I do not know yet,” and less dependent on other people’s assumptions and praise to know whether my work is good. Those are habits I want to keep, and I think they will make me a better worker than the version of me who flew over here two months ago.
