Company visits are consolidated as the strong point of the FP/Parke initiative

The VET students who took part in this year’s edition – nearly 1,000 students from 20 schools in the Basque Country – gave the highest marks to the part dedicated to getting to know some of the 34 participating technology companies ‘in situ’ and in the company of their managers.

The FP/Parke initiative, promoted by the Basque Country Technology Park together with the two main associations of vocational training centres in the Basque Country, HETEL and Ikaslan, to promote the relationship between vocational training and the scientific-technological business fabric, already has a star point: visits to companies. This is the main figure that emerges from the satisfaction surveys carried out among the students participating in this year’s edition – held in the three territories on 12 March – and who gave an average score of over 8 for this activity.

The organisers of FP/Parke wanted to highlight that this fact consolidates the commitment to the creation of spaces for direct meetings between students and companies as a tool for promoting vocations, just at the time when enrolment for the Baccalaureate courses in Vocational Training is taking place.

The visits, in any case, were the culmination of a programme that was able to mobilise around 1,000 students from the 1st year of the Baccalaureate to “take over” the facilities of 3 of the Technology Park’s campuses in Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa. The first part of the day included presentations and experiences on scientific-technological vocations and the importance of connecting vocational training with technology companies.

This first session also saw the presentation of the winning proposal of the “challenge” posed to the academic centres, which consisted of drawing up a Curriculum Vitae adapted to the real needs of one of the 34 companies participating in this year’s initiative. During the previous weeks, the students were working on a Specific Didactic Unit in each centre, in which they analysed the needs of one of the participating companies in order to make their CV proposal.

The second part consisted of a visit by the students to each of the companies for which they had prepared the CV challenge, with the aim of giving them first-hand knowledge of the reality of the company and the scope of their proposals. The result and the assessment given by the students highlight the success of this initiative, recognised with the STEAM Euskadi seal of the Basque Government’s Department of Education and Innobasque, which has already become a reference and meeting point for VET and Science and Technology.