HIMOINSA and YANMAR have signed an agreement with the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT) to continue their training and employment programme for another four years in order to promote the recruitment of students at the Industrial Engineering School.

“We select final-year industrial degree students and we train them step-by-step, offering them a year’s work experience at our facilities in San Javier (Murcia), an intensive English course abroad and a contract for a job in any one of HIMOINSA’s engineering centres in America, Asia or Europe", says Francisco Gracia, Executive Director of HIMOINSA, who attended the signing of the agreement together with Jun Takashima, Executive Director of HIMOINSA, and Tetsuya Yamamoto, Managing Director of Yanmar Co. Ltd. and Chairman of Yanmar Energy System (YES). 

As the agreement has already been in effect for several years, many students have completed their university training in HIMOINSA. Today some of them, as José María Hernández and Javier Ortín, are members of the engineering team at the company’s production centre in USA. “We started working at HIMOINSA in January 2016 and after several months’ training we signed our contract in September. Every three months we rotated between the different engineering departments; the Technical Office, Product Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Prototyping, Operations… so that we could learn all about how the company worked from the inside”, says José María, who greatly appreciates his career path in HIMOINSA not to mention the opportunity he has been given to contribute to the new North American project.

This training plan is open to last-year students taking degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electronic Engineering, as well as master's degrees in Industrial Organisation, Industrial Engineering and Instrumentation. They spend one year gaining work experience in the company, they take an intensive English course during the summer months and then, once they have graduated, they are offered a contract for a job either in the Region of Murcia or overseas.

The Careers Guidance and Information Centre (COIE) of the UPCT and the Industrial School assess and pre-select candidates according to their academic record and their suitability vis-à-vis the profiles required by the company. The company then invites the pre-selected students to attend an interview process. 

“HIMOINSA is an extremely important company for the economy of our region and indeed that of the entire country. It is a company that has invested in its international expansion with top-level technological products and services and we have been collaborating with them for years now, through our research groups and the work practice they offer our students,” said Alejandro Diaz, Rector of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena.