As part of the nationwide "My tenth-grade internship," program, the CSTJF in Pau welcomed high-school students who came to discover the wide variety of professions open to them in the energy sector. An educational and immersive program designed to encourage young people to think about a professional future in the energy sector and show them what the world of work is really like. We talked to Jeanne, an internship student, and Yannick Guillemot, architect for renewable energies projects and an enthusiastic tutor.
 

From June 16 to 27, the TotalEnergies site in Pau welcomed 122 tenth-grade students studying the general or technological baccalaureate as part of the "My tenth-grade internship program". Was it a work-shadowing internship? Not quite. At the CSTJF, we set our sights a little higher! The Pau site has created a structured, educational program that enables high-school students to find out about different professions and think about their own career prospects.

Like Jeanne Chapteuil, a tenth-grade student at the Louis Barthou high school, who applied for the internship after an announcement made by her form teacher. "I’d heard about TotalEnergies from people who had been on expatriation assignments, but I had no idea of the kind of professions or sectors of activity involved," she explains.
 

An inspiring program led by committed tutors

For two weeks, students alternated between group sessions in the auditorium, workshops in small groups, tours of the facilities and meetings with the different teams. The idea was to enable them to find out about the Company’s different missions and activities, based on the site in the Béarn region. Some of the highlights of the internship included the tour of the waste collection site, the Pangea supercomputer, the medical department, and the CSTJF training center, as well as workshops to learn how to write a CV and how to shoot videos.

"I was really surprised by the variety of different jobs there were,” Jeanne explains. Right now, I’m thinking of studying sciences, even if I still don’t know exactly what I want to do. What I really liked was understanding how solar panels worked and how they generate power."

Yannick Guillemot is one of the 52 tutor-staff, all volunteers. For this renewable energies architect, volunteering for the first time, it was a demanding yet rewarding experience. "I usually take on interns from engineering schools” he points out. In this case, I had to adapt my explanations. I gave a presentation on batteries, I subject I’m very interested in, but one which can seem technical and complex. To hold the students’ attention, I started out with things they are familiar with: smartphones that overheat, electric vehicles, etc. During the presentation of his job at the auditorium, the discussion took an interesting turn when a student asked him if TotalEnergies was thinking about creating batteries without rare-earth elements (REE), to limit its dependence on China. "A very pertinent question that made me rethink certain standard practices in my job. When you’re a tutor, you end up questioning your own ideas and it helps gain a little perspective!"
 

Young people from priority districts

With more than 1,000 students on the two-week internships on the different sites of the multi-energy Company, TotalEnergies upholds the commitments made as part of its sustainable development strategy and the priorities of its Corporate Foundation, working to improve young people’s inclusion. "We put particular emphasis on hiring young people in socially vulnerable situations, to offset the fact that they do not have a family network to obtain a quality internship. Well upstream of the mandatory internship, we contacted local integration structures with whom we have close relations" explains Isabelle Porterie, Head of External Relations. The idea behind this commitment is to show young people that the energy sector is open to everyone, with a variety of jobs at the crossroads of innovation, technology, and environmental commitment, and that it is important for tomorrow’s citizens to understand the inner workings.

The organizers who designed the immersive induction program on the site also included a specific focus on the "support" professions, such as communication, HR, social law, cost control and procurement, as well as even more cross-functional issues such as disability and inclusion, to adapt to the wide variety of course options taken by the high-school students.