SPECIALIZED TRAINING

An Industrial Painting School in the Future of ipcm® Academy

Monica Fumagalli ipcm®

We continue our series of interviews with the protagonists of the professional training courses organised by ipcm® Academy, our publishing house’s division specialising in the education and training of coating technicians. This time, we have involved two lecturers who started their collaboration with the Academy in 2019: Franco Falcone, an expert in aluminium surface treatments, and Anastasios Vergani, an expert in waste water treatment and ZLD systems for metal finishing lines. Thanks to their experience in the educational field, we have gathered many interesting ideas and suggestions that will also help lay the foundations for the project of setting up an industrial painting school, which is among the next main objectives of ipcm® Academy.

“One of the most stimulating aspects that a vocational teacher can find in the ipcm® Academy courses,” says Franco Falcone, “is undoubtedly the variety of sectors to which the students belong and the fact that they do not always have a university education, as is the case for some of the lectures we give at the Politecnico di Milano. This is exciting because, on the one hand, we are confronted with people with different work experiences (including, sometimes, no experience at all, as in the case of high school graduates), and, on the other hand, we are called to find the key to help people with different levels of

technical knowledge understand the basics of such complex subjects as surface treatments. Indeed, one of the suggestions I would like to make in order to optimise the Academy’s teaching schedule is to introduce an initial module providing an overview of the different coating cycles that are going to be explored in more detail in the following modules, so that those approaching this world for the first time can start off by learning some basic notions.” “One of the advantages of a modular structure such as that of the ipcm® Academy’s course, with its 100 hours of lessons over 12 days,” confirms Vergani, “is precisely the number of hours available to study different topics in depth, even the most difficult ones, and ensure that all the students have time to grasp them. For example, 7-day-a-week intensive courses certainly do not offer this possibility.”

ipcm® Academy News

Since 2011, ipcm® Academy has been training surface treatment specialists with the aim of supporting them in the present and future market through in-depth study of the most up-to-date issues with specialised theoretical and practical courses. For about a year now, the professional training courses organised by ipcm® Academy have been designed to train new Industrial Surface Finishing Process Technologists, a profession now included in the Framework of Professional Standards of the Lombardy region and recognised at both the Italian and European levels. Thanks to this course, eight Industrial Surface Finishing Process Technologists have already been certified to date.

However, ipcm® Academy never stops: it is already up and running with its autumn session courses and it is planning important innovations to expand its educational offer by including among its course topics the formulation of paint products and plastic coating processes. Next year’s educational programme and the date of the next Open Day, when all the new 2022 innovations will be presented, will soon be available on the website https://ipcmacademy.com.

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Franco Falcone (left), an expert in aluminium surface treatments, and Anastasios Vergani, an expert in waste water treatment and ZLD systems for metal finishing lines.

© ipcm

A moment from the class “Pretreatment prior to metal coating” of the ipcm® Academy training courses.

From this perspective, the plan for an actual “industrial painting school” has already been drawn up. “In order to implement it,” indicates Falcone, “we need a scientific committee made up of experts in the field to define the annual programme and technical and scientific coordination between teachers, which is often lacking in vocational training courses. This project for a painting school is very interesting and it has my full support not only as a lecturer but also and above all as an entrepreneur. We are always looking for welltrained staff, which is still hard to find in our industry. I would like my team to include not only people with technical-scientific degrees, but also young graduates with sound training and the right skills, such as those that the Academy school could provide. They would be ready to take on the most diverse tasks in the context of surface treatment processes and gradually specialise in the field, thus becoming indispensable resources who are difficult to replace precisely because they are trained and “shaped” in the factory.” “As a former student at a technical institute who went on to become the technical director of a company specialising in waste water treatment,” says Vergani, “I can confirm that the training course set up by the ipcm® Academy is an important tool for those who, like me, undertook studies other than the sector in which they later chose to work. Its school could be the link between secondary education and industrial world that everyone is calling for, but which is difficult to achieve in today’s world of work.” A further element in the increasingly specialised training of future paintshop operators is the official recognition of the new profession of Industrial Surface Finishing Process Technologist by the Lombardy Region, obtained last year thanks to the partnership between ipcm® Academy and the ASP Mazzini Institute (Cinisello Balsamo, Milan, Italy). “This certification fills a historical gap in our industry,” states Falcone, “and it offers a further contribution to the industrial culture not only in Italy but also at the European level.” The Academy’s journey, therefore, cannot stop here. Meanwhile, one of its main shortterm objectives is to expand the range of courses and introduce further modules to explore the peculiarities and critical issues of an ever-increasing number of surface processes, in terms of both materials and application cycles.