Continental chose Frankfurt am Main as the location for this year’s workshop of its Global Engineering Internship Program (GEIP). The workshop, being part of the second international GEIP year, was extremely successful. The 16 students from five different nations who took part in the event met representatives of the GEIP partner universities and of Continental.

The workshop also was this year’s GEIP highlight. The program is aimed at fostering a more international approach to the training of engineers and scientists. Students are given the opportunity to gain experience in international project work even before their graduation. Additional parts of the GEIP are an academic program and a several month internship at one of the worldwide locations.  

 “In today’s working environment, we are searching for engineers who have a global expertise. The GEIP is Continental’s contribution to an international, very practice oriented apprenticeship”, says Bärbel Henghuber, Corporate Employer Branding & Recruiting, who is responsible for the GEIP.

In addition to training the participants’ intercultural competence, the agenda for the workshop focused on topics such as the significance of internationally linking R&D activities with the production. Special highlights were interview sessions with Senior Vice President Rainer Hetzer and Executive Board Member Heinz-Gerhard Wente, who was very enthusiastic about the GEIP: “GEIP is a highly attractive and cogently complements our training line-up at Continental. Above all, it offers the interns coming out of it a host of valuable opportunities for starting a professional career in an international environment and the company the possibility to early get in contact with very good students”, Wente says.

With the GEIP, Continental has already started to implement the recommendations of the “Global Engineering Excellence” Study (GEE), the internationally oriented education for engineers, in 2008. For the ambitious “Global Engineering Excellence” project, Continental was able to win over eight renowned universities in 2005. They study the perspectives and social position of engineers as well as their education and impact on the performance capabilities of economies, and consequently draw conclusions from these findings.