Companies at the heart of the program
A unique apprenticeship program
In 1998, ESA was accredited by CTI, Commission for Title of Engineers to deliver the Engineer program. It is the start of a success story between companies and Higher Education. The companies, at the heart of the program, collaborate with ESA Angers to build a study program whose objective is to answer the global challenges led by their international expansion. At that time, globalization was quite recent and the French companies were facing with intercultural questionning and with very few harmonization of education systems in the world. Thus, the question was : How to face with the growing needs of the companies to recruit people with intercultural skills?
After a period of brainstorming between companies and ESA Angers, the master program was launched ; giving the possibility to international students to study and work during their curriculum.
Thanks to the fruitful collaboration between ESA and the French company, Bongrain (now Savencia Fomage et Dairy), Maxime PETROV, a Russian student is the first international Engineer to graduate from the study and work program – I²FA.
Many other students will be then graduating from the program with in-hands experience and academic knowlege and skills, ready to kick-start their career.
Give apprenticeship an international value.
The program’s objective
The program aims to train engineers specialized in an agricultural field with double competences : understanding the multicultural language and understanding the French culture and its rules and regulations. The would-be graduate students are true assets for the companies, being able to communicate easily within the company and to adapt to any environment.
Thanks to the apprenticeship (study and work format) which is at the heart of the program, it allows the students to be trained next to the Engineers of the French companies and to be familiarized with the corporate culture.
After following the French language classes for few months, the students spend more than 900 hours working on one of the companies’ sites in France. The rest of the program is dedicated to acquiring the scientific knowledge and skills, necessary to be able to work in the field in France and after graduation, in the subsidiaries abroad.
After 20 years ….
Still today, ESA Angers is one of the few French Engineering schools to offer the international students the master program by apprenticeship.
We can sum up the 20 years of the program with few figures :
More than 200 graduate Engineers
35 partner companies
4 continents represented
✔ 1 Alumi network
It is definitely not the end of the success story since the new class 2023 has recently started its studies at ESA on the campus in Angers. It is the beginning of another chapter of the program’s story filled with upcoming professionnal success stories !
