Fritz Studer AG congratulates its successful employee on a large poster located directly on the busy street and in front of the factory buildings in Steffisburg BE: 20-year-old Gil Beutler won a bronze medal at the WorldSkills Competition 2022 in Canada a few weeks ago.
“Gil is an ambassador for us,” says Roger Leuenberger, who is responsible for vocational training at the company. “This is even more important at a time when it is increasingly difficult to find apprentices and employees.” The importance of Gil Beutler within the company, which has approximately 700 employees, is also reflected in the fact that his achievements in professional competitions are included in the annual report.
Suddenly a new discipline
Beutler had to fight hard to win a bronze medal at WorldSkills. In normal day-to-day business, everything is within a thousandth of a millimeter. For the high-precision angle grinders from Fritz Studer AG to work, polymechanics must produce parts exactly like this. The cost of technological high-tech systems, which can extend up to six meters, ranges from 120,000 to one million Swiss francs. And it is used, for example, in the automotive industry.
But at WorldSkills, Beutler was no longer just about the best precision, but also about a craft he had to learn very quickly: welding and bending pipes. Then he had to prove he could do it under competitive conditions at WorldSkills, which took three days. Memories of this competition mission aren’t the best: “I made a few mistakes and couldn’t get the job done in a short time.” However, he wasn’t the only one with major problems with the mission.
“Great enough for the podium”
Today, three weeks after returning from WorldSkills overseas, this is just an anecdote for Beutler. “I did very well in the other three competition modules, which included turning and milling. The day after the unconventional welding task I was able to focus well again.” He is very happy to get the bronze medal. “I did my best. It’s great that it’s enough for the podium.” After all, the gaps between the second and fifth places were extremely small.
Gil Beutler has already won a number of medals in his short professional career: gold in SwissSkills in 2020, silver in EuroSkills in 2021 and now bronze in world championships. As training manager Leuenberger says, he’s not the first person at the company to have had such great success in professional championships. “For us, it’s a success story.” Also with a positive impact on vocational training: This is one of the reasons why the company management has approved the purchase of two new CNC machines for the training workshop.
take time for education
Beutler completed his apprenticeship at Fritz Studer AG and successfully completed it last summer. The company gave him time to prepare for the World Championship. Since the summer, he has only had to be productive 50 percent of the time and can use the rest of the time for training. “He usually stayed longer and was in the workshop on Saturdays,” says Leuenberger. “So he acted as a role model for our apprentices.” Vocational training is very important in the company: ten percent of the company’s approximately 700 employees are apprentices.
“When I was also looking for an internship, I knew that an apprentice from Fritz Studer AG was participating in professional world championships,” Beutler says. While that wasn’t the deciding factor in getting an apprenticeship there, it certainly impressed him. “I never thought I’d come this far.”
why source?
So why did the polymechanics at WorldSkills suddenly have to weld and bend pipes – an activity that wasn’t actually part of the job? In Canada, there is a particular orientation for industrial mechanics in this profession whose space includes this type of work. That is why this discipline is included in the catalog of the competition. By the way, it did not do much for Canadians: its own participants … were the last.