Time to grow: Polytechnic students completed an internship at the Toyota plant

Polytechnic University in conjunction with Toyota goes on with the implementation of educational project “Time to grow”, which has no analogues in Russia. The university and the largest automobile corporation have teamed up so that students receive not only theoretical knowledge, but also skills in modern manufacturing. After test assignments and interviews, nine lucky ones were selected for an internship at Toyota Motor Plant in St. Petersburg.

Altogether, 300 Polytechnic students studied under the program. Senior Vice President of Toyota Motor Europe Katsutoshi NISIMOTO introduced the young people to the Japanese philosophy of continuous production improvement called "kaizen". Not only he talked about the quality standards of the company, but also spoke about his more than 30 years of experience. The final stage of the theoretical part was a test: students who passed it received a certificate of additional education.

Then, on a competitive basis, 20 students were selected who were given the opportunity to visit the Toyota plant and have an interview there. According to its results, nine Polytechnic students were invited to a production internship. Among them were Alexei TALANIN and Bogdan ABRAMOV.

The internship began in March. First, the students were given a full briefing and a tour of the production, after which they were assigned to different workshops. Bogdan was admitted to the assembly shop, and his first task was to analyze one of the stations of the final line, where the last stage of the car assembly is carried out. Aleksey TALANIN, on the other hand, got into the welding workshop and was engaged in optimization of logistics processes there.

Students and engineers even teamed up to offer solutions for optimizing various stations in the workshops, but a pandemic intervened in the design work. Young people hope that when the situation stabilizes and the plant starts working at its full capacity, they will be able to return to their projects.