First year student year in the ESC Montpellier Masters Program–, Valerie Dubois showed an instinctive sense of managerial innovation, even before she came to Sup de Co Montpellier.

For Valerie, management is in her blood. During her IUT work placement at a large industrial production company, she was in charge of  an industrial plant restoration project. That included: equipment installation and making sure that environmental safety quality specifications were met.  Mentored by a manager who gave her the latitude to express her potential, she served as intermediary between the production line team and the methods planning department.

A skillful mediation

"They only communicated by email  or telephone and their relations were very bad when it came to problems", she recalls. But Valerie's listening  and communications skills were soon tested in the face of the project‘s difficulties and she was able to make things move quickly along. "As a project manager, I didn't consider myself  above the technicians, I had much more to learn from them, than they did from me. I took their comments into consideration so they felt listened to ",  said Valerie. She also realized that the production manager has to listen to the suggestions of the technicians: "We put in a suggestion box because this traditional lack of consideration prevented feedback", explains the former trainee.

Very quickly the suggestion box became obsolete because the project required everyone's constant involvement :  "We had many concerns when we restarted  production, and we all put in long hours", said Valerie. In light of  these difficulties, meetings were organized in which the planning department had regular exchanges with the production operators. Progressively, the relations of the two departments became very cooperative.  "Last week, they told me that everything was working  well, and that the production manager had been transferred",  Valerie says.

A blossoming vocation

With her IUT diploma in mechanical engineering in hand, Valérie took entrance exams to advanced engineering schools as well as business schools. After long discussions with her entourage she decided that, "even if industrial managers were more recruited among the ranks  of engineers, I already had the technical training, so I wanted to get more into  management". She chose Montpellier "because of its reputation for sandwich courses, its national  ranking, and also because I wished to remain in the South", she explained.

For her second year, Valerie is currently seeking a sandwich course contract as an environmental quality manager in the industrial sector:  "I have some leads but they're mainly seeking engineering  profiles ". No need  to worry about this girl though, with her background and experience, we have no doubt that she will find a company  that suits her perfectly!

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