The UPCT awards HIMOINSA the ‘Mateo Vodopich’ prize for its collaboration in training industrial engineers

The company selects pupils for training that involves an initial one-year internship and an employment contract which, in the majority of cases, will be for a minimum of five years.

HIMOINSA has received the ‘Mateo Vodopich’ prize which is awarded every year by the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena (the Polytechnic University of Cartagena - UPCT) to companies that help to train university students at the School of Advanced Industrial Engineering (ETSII).

The Executive Director of HIMOINSA, Jun Takashima, together with the company's Director of Engineering, Manuel Sánchez Bada, and HR Director, Marta Garrido, received the award from José Hernández Grau, the Deputy Director of Institutional Relations and Employment at the Industrial Engineering School, during the graduation ceremony for students who completed their studies in 2016.

At the end of 2015, HIMOINSA and the UPCT signed an agreement to initiate a training and employment programme. The company selects students in their final years of their industrial degrees to gradually train them during an initial internship. The students take an intensive course in English and receive an employment contract which, in the majority of cases, is for a minimum of five years. During the first two years of the contract, the UPCT students continue their internal training in Himoinsa’s headquarters in San Javier, Spain. As of year three, they can move to the factories that the company has in France, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, India and China or to one of our subsidiaries in Portugal, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Argentina, Angola, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.

The Director of the ETSII at the UPCT, Patricio Franco, states categorically that "HIMOINSA is a highly important company that is committed to its expansion at the international level, with products and services of a high technological level. We are most grateful to them for their commitment to train our graduates and to incorporate them into their workforce."

The results of the first year of the agreement have turned out to be so positive that Yanmar, the Japanese business group to which HIMOINSA belongs, has expressed its interest in extending this agreement to its own engineering centers and incorporating two more students each year. "They would be trained in HIMOINSA for two years, and then they would move to the Yanmar's production plants in Japan. Finally, they would move back to one of Yanmar's head offices in Europe," adds Manuel Sánchez Bada, HIMOINSA Engineering Director.

Members of the Yanmar corporation and of HIMOINSA have held a meeting to discuss the viability of this new project. "We are interested in extending to Yanmar this training and employment model that HIMOINSA has already initiated. Our objective would be to incorporate up to 10 university students into Yanmar's engineering centres over the next number of years," states Akihiro Nishimura, General Manager of Yanmar Energy Systems Business. "These students would join the 20 that HIMOINSA is going to incorporate between 2015 and 2020," concludes Jun Takashima, who insists that it is the responsibility of corporations to encourage and channel the access of university graduates into the labour market.