Georges Fer­nan­des is a project man­ag­er at SPIE INDUSTRIE.

You worked with Romain Bel, a mechanical engineering student at UTC and top-level fencer. What was his role?

Romain Bel was on a busi­ness engi­neer­ing place­ment with our com­pa­ny SPIE Indus­tries in the Paris region. Our com­pa­ny deals with ener­gy, elec­tric­i­ty and com­mu­ni­ca­tions, from design to imple­men­ta­tion, not for­get­ting main­te­nance. Romain’s tasks involved tech­ni­cal, com­mer­cial, finan­cial and man­age­ment mis­sions. He worked on analy­ses of mechan­i­cal sys­tems, in par­tic­u­lar iden­ti­fy­ing the crit­i­cal parts to be kept in stock to avoid poten­tial delays. He man­aged invoic­ing for cer­tain con­tracts, and planned and mon­i­tored the work of main­te­nance teams in the field. He was exposed to a wide range of tasks and learned new skills. I was very hap­py to be his tutor and to see how quick­ly he inte­grat­ed into the teams. I have to admit that at first I was reluc­tant to have a young engi­neer on board, because they often don’t have the same build­ing cul­ture as us. But now I’m convinced.

What has been the added-value of such a recruitment?

A young recruit like Romain Bel is a real asset for us. When these young engi­neers are well trained, they know how to adapt and have real know-how. Romain was quick to make him­self use­ful and autonomous in just a few weeks. My own back­ground is in the field, and at the time engi­neers weren’t as high­ly regard­ed. When you meet Romain, you can see that he wants to learn and not make mis­takes. He was able to deploy his tal­ents and cre­ate a method­ol­o­gy in a very spe­cif­ic process that didn’t exist before and that we’re going to main­tain in the com­pa­ny over the long term. I gave him a “carte blanche” and he suc­ceed­ed in devel­op­ing use­ful and effi­cient software.

Did the fact that Romain Bel is also a top-level sportsman make a difference?

My son is a stu­dent ath­lete in ice hock­ey and I can see what that does for a person’s men­tal out­look. They have that sport­ing spir­it, that mind­set, which makes it eas­i­er for them to chal­lenge them­selves. Romain Bel has more than fif­teen years of top-lev­el fenc­ing under his belt. He is part of the UTC’s Sports Elite pro­gramme. His aim is to be the best. These pro­files know how to han­dle pres­sure and stress. They are always smil­ing, always avail­able and able to adapt their sched­ules to the needs of the com­pa­ny. Romain had set him­self the chal­lenge that before he left us, this soft­ware pack­age had to be oper­a­tional and he was successful.