Marchesini Group Orienta: the future is here!

“Money, dedication, hard slog, repetitive, improvement, study, financial independence, living on your own.” These are just some of the concepts the boys and girls of middle-school age linked to their idea of “work”. This brainstorming session marked the start of the “Orienta” event hosted by Marchesini Group at its Pianoro Headquarters on 4 December for middle-school pupils and their parents, to share information about the jobs of the future and the most useful skills. More than 200 people attended: 115 mum and dads and 96 kids aged 12 and 13 getting to grips with the difficult choice of the right high school for them, at an age when life is often confusing and full of unanswered questions.

Marchesini Group decided to host a career guidance event on-site to provide young people and their families with a different point of view, closer to the world of work. The afternoon was structured in two parts, first a visit to the factory to see the pharma and beauty product packaging lines and machines, with Group staff on hand to explain their operation to the young visitors and illustrate the high-tech aspects of the production system, with its use of robots and AI. This was followed by a discussion with Valentina Marchesini, the multinational’s Head of Human Resources, Marketing and Communication, and Fabiana Andreani, an expert on career choices and development for under-35s very active on Instagram and TikTok. 

“We view this as an investment in the future. The fact is that it’s no good our just complaining about the difficulty in recruiting specialist technical staff: we have to do something about it. So we decided to organise a career guidance event for the very youngest age-group here, in our plant,” Valentina Marchesini explains. “We love introducing kids to our organisation, inviting them into the factory to stimulate their curiosity, show them what happens inside, give them insight into what working for the company’s like and try to answer all their questions, or perhaps even inspire some more. The event has various aims. On the one hand, we want to explain which skills are most in demand and the professional roles we need the most, while on the other we’d like to put the message across about the value of an education focused on STEM subjects, overcoming the prejudice that looks down on it as “inferior”. Some of our best engineers both male and female, attended technical high school before going on to university.”

It was underlined that career paths don’t run in straight lines, in a single direction; they’re actually full of forks and turnings, and involve choices, change and lifetime learning. The young people and their parents had plenty of questions, many of them regarding the top priorities when choosing a high school:

“It’s best to choose what the young person likes doing now: of course they should listen to advice from their parents and teachers, but in the end it’s their decision,” Fabiana Andreani emphasised, “and they should remember that they can always change and every educational and career path has its own worth because it reflects the person concerned.” 

Of course, even at middle-school age some pupils may already have discovered they have a talent or become passionate about a career. In that case, Valentina Marchesini encourages them, “fight for your passion, trust in your abilities and do your best.”