“We are not only capable, we are needed”: from internship to the team

Francisca Burgos is 24 and studied industrial mechanics at CFT Lota Arauco, a technical training college in Chile's Biobío region. She did her internship at Truck Energy and stayed on: today she works at the company, in metrology. In this video, in Spanish, she tells how it went.

She says she was made welcome and that, first of all, they taught her. Some things did not come easily, but in her internship, which lasted almost three months, she learned a great deal. One example is the inside micrometer, which measures a diameter from the inside and only reads true when it sits right: “It has its positions; you can't just put it in and measure.”

She also learned from a mistake in her first days: when taking out an armature, she did not discharge it and felt a small voltage. “That taught me I always have to discharge the armature,” she says. A winding can hold an electrical charge after a test, which is why it is discharged before anyone handles it.

Does she see a future for herself at the company? “Of course,” she answers, and that is exactly why she has an invitation for women: to dare.

“As a woman you think: I don't belong there, maybe I'm not capable, or maybe because I'm a woman. But no, quite the opposite. Today we women are more needed in industry than we think. We are not only capable, we are needed.”

And she wants to keep growing: next year she plans to go on studying engineering, to keep training and moving up, and to be better “here or anywhere else.”

The video ends in the workshop with Yhara Oviedo, 21, a repair assistant, removing a brush holder from a D77 traction motor.

Both appear among the new team members welcomed in the first issue of the company newsletter, in May. That issue also covered Truck Energy's partnership with CFT Lota Arauco and the Juan Rubio Arias scholarship, which covers transport and meals for women students in the college's industrial programs.