Mencía Tarín García and Irene Bernad de Olano, students from the campus, tell us about their participation in the third edition of EMPLEA.
For Mencía Tarín García student, a student of the double degree in Telecommunication Systems Engineering, Sound and Image + Audiovisual Communication which is taught at the Gandia campus of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), to form part of the program EMPLEA “it has been a process of self-discovery” that has helped him “to see how projects are managed, what the working methods are and, above all, it has given me contacts that will surely be valuable”.
EMPLEA is the women’s leadership and positioning program in organizations promoted by the Vice-Rectorate for Employment, Lifelong Learning and Languages of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) through the Integrated Employment Service. Mencía was impressed “from the very beginning”, mainly “because of her role in promoting female leadership.
Mencia has participated in the challenge posed by Siemens. The project was developed to develop “a tool for railway predictive maintenance using Artificial Intelligence and that would also help to avoid ageism, both in senior and junior maintainers”.
“We had a variety of training sessions, from classes to develop skills such as negotiation or financial analysis to training on glass ceilings. And a final session in which several female mentors reviewed their path to their current positions and told us about their experience as women leaders.”
After her time with EMPLEA, “I would recommend this program to any student who wants to meet new people, test themselves with challenges and get a little more education,” says Mencia.
Management skills training
The recommendation has been followed by his classmate Irene Bernad de Olano. For her “participating in EMPLEA has been a turning point in my life and has given me much more than I had originally thought.
Irene has worked on the Tech4Inclusion challenge: innovation for inclusion or how technology can help refugees adapt more quickly to their new environments. The team she has been part of devised “a digital training and employability program for unaccompanied minors arriving in Spain”. The proposal, which will be implemented next year, “will be my TFG”.
In addition, thanks to her work with Emplea, she has obtained a training scholarship that will take her to China with the help of Huawei, the company that set the challenge. “EMPLEA has given me a much more complete vision of the steps that need to be taken and the aspects that need to be taken into account to carry out a project,” says Irene.
Leadership and female talent
EMPLEA has a clear objective: to promote and consolidate the leadership and positioning of female talent in organizations. 42 students have chosen to solve the challenges proposed by different companies and have been tutored by 14 female mentors, who occupy high positions in these companies and who have been an example and guide for them.
Aimplas, BBVA, BP, Deustche Telecom, Edwards Lifescience, El Corte Inglés, Fermax, Huawei, Mercadona, Minsait, Navantia, NTT data, PWC and Siemens were the participating companies.
More information on the third edition of EMPLEA, its participants and the winners of 2025, in this link.