Heidelberg has announced that it is taking five refugees onto its internship programme and said it hopes all five will progress onto its formal three-year training programme. The refugees, from Afghanistan, Syria and Nigeria, will begin their funded internships at the start of November, alongside 12 other new interns. All funding for them was made available through Heidelberg.
Heidelberg training manager at its Wiesloch-Walldorf plant Andreas Blum said: “The overall situation in Germany is that more than a million refugees came in the last year so Heidelberg as a company thought ‘What can we do?’.
“This was not only on the social responsibility side but also how can we benefit from the situation? So we talked internally with several agencies around Heidelberg and came to the point where we said ‘Okay, we want to set up something that can be really sustainable’.
“We don’t want to do a marketing thing and just hire 50 people, because we can’t give all of the 50 a contract. But now there really is a chance for every single one of these refugees to get a contract and that is what we want to focus on.”
The newly joined interns will spend three days a week doing practical training at the Wiesloch plant, in areas such as mechanics, mechatronics and printing technologies, as well as logistics, which Blum described as having “quite a demand” at the moment.