Added: Over a year ago by Fujifilm
University students joining FUJIFILM Ink Solutions Group on a 12-month industrial placement will never forget the experience – whether they enter our industry or another. That’s because our mentors focus on providing STEM students with a complete learning experience that explores innovative chemistry, engineering and their application in industrial printing inks, nurturing skills they can take beyond their placement.
If students are excellent, we want to retain them. However, if a student decides Fujifilm is not for them, we also consider it a good outcome. It means the placement has clarified the work the students enjoy so that they won’t make a wrong career decision – something integration manager Barry McGregor is keen to avoid.
Barry, who helps run the Group’s mentorship scheme, works at our engineering site in Cambridge. He says: “I made bad career choices after graduating, chasing jobs for money, not for the love of the work. The work was a bad fit, but a mentor changed my life by giving me opportunities to get back on track. Similarly, I want to ensure our interns get the best value out of the scheme and company, gaining experience that ensures they embark on the right career path.”
Our highly experienced mentors welcome interns at our three sites – Cambridge, Broadstairs and Grangemouth. Cambridge is the historical inkjet capital of Europe, so it’s home to our engineering team. They support our technicians and chemists in Research and Development (R&D) in Broadstairs and Grangemouth and are looking for interns in mechatronics, electronics engineering, mechanical engineering, automation and software.
Barry recently mentored Janielle Fish, studying product design engineering at Loughborough University. He says: “Our students are so geographically dispersed when they start their placement that we run a group challenge to bring all of them together on a common task.
This year’s challenge was Fuel Change. Janielle represented our company in promotional videos explaining the opportunity, which Fuel Change used on its website. Another of our students attended COP26 as one of the outcomes of this challenge. We always look for great experiences like these for a student’s CV.”
At Cambridge, they seek students with base engineering skills willing to engage with the wide range of capabilities on-site. These can cover fluid dynamics, pneumatics, electronics and the physical interactions of minute droplets, down to 1-2 picolitres in volume, with the substrate they land on to create an image.
The Grangemouth and Broadstairs sites both have R&D and manufacturing facilities. However, Grangemouth makes water-based pigment dispersions (the particles in industrial printing inks), whereas Broadstairs focuses on UV curable inks and UV pigment dispersions. Both sites take chemistry interns who are introduced to R&D operations and test equipment until they reach a level where they may be trusted with a high-profile project.
Dr Dolores Caras-Quintero, dispersions head at Broadstairs, has just spent a year mentoring Jordan Taylor, an MChem Forensic and Analytical Chemistry student from the University of Strathclyde. Dolores says: “The experience we provide is big. It goes beyond the laboratory environment. We give students exposure to different environments until they gain understanding and confidence. We want them to experience what it’s like working in a large company. So, we invited Jordan to come to virtual meetings with our colleagues in Japan, for example.”
Another chemist, Jordan Bylka, from the same university, was also included in regular meetings to understand his project and the required resources. He enjoyed his year at Grangemouth so much that he elected to stay until the last day of the summer break. Reactive dispersions development manager Lilian Monahan was his mentor. She says: “Jordan began as we would mentor any new starter. He was given a starter package that included our training and competency framework, which allowed him to work safely in the lab, so we could get him up and running. After the induction, there was analytical training using instruments and lab training.”
Jordan had work to do with his university degree like most student interns. He was asked to research a subject that Fujifilm was interested in – stabilising carbon black. Lilian says: “Undergraduates on our placement programme get a fantastic opportunity to see how the subject, chemistry, is applied in the real world to solve problems. They do that with hands-on experience specific to our business and transferable skills such as time management, planning, communication and interactivity with teams.”
Everyone in industrial printing inks is constantly learning, and we hope that enthuses students on our placement scheme as much as it does us.
Barry says: “Students can see manufacturing companies as dinosaurs, but inkjet is one of the most exciting fields I’ve operated in, with a lot of fascinating technology we’re investigating. Students are often surprised by the high level of complexity and the great experience they can have in this field. Because it’s moving so fast, there are many opportunities to do ground-breaking work.”
