At the College of Engineers we never stop detailing the house’s hunting list: that of the personalities who have sat on its benches. Among them, a former prime minister (Elisabeth Borne), a former minister (Julien Denormandie), the founder of a health insurance company valued at 4 billion euros ((Jean-Charles Samuelian, CEO of Alan)… “When a company joins our training, it is saying that it will find its future CEO in one of our promotions: this is what happened to Air Liquide, whose new director, François Jackow, is a former “university student”. »observes Bruno Boulay, who directs this MBA that has been taught every year since 1986 to about forty young people from the largest engineering schools.
The College of Engineers teaches its courses in an old private mansion on Boulevard Saint-Germain, in Paris, which at the end of the 19th centurymy century, hosted the meetings of the Saint-Simon Circle, this association of great intellectuals and fortunes of the time such as Anatole France, Edmond de Rothschild and Jules Verne. In this neo-Renaissance style building, where the Alliance Française was founded, networks conducive to business, both economic and political, were established. Something of this soul remained with the creation of the School of Engineers: the training aims to be a professional acceleration ramp, thanks, in particular, to the address book built there.
Contrary to what is done in most MBAs, aimed at executives with several years of professional life behind them, hiring (less than 15% of applications are accepted) is carried out immediately after finishing school, thinking in Polytechnique et Centrale. But the College’s atypical formula lies in its financing: while MBA students usually have to shell out tens of thousands of euros for this line of their CV, “university students” charge for the time of their training, up to the minimum wage. They are employees of the establishment, and in exchange they carry out consulting missions in companies, most of them large industrial groups, such as Air Liquide, Sanofi or TotalEnergies; They are the ones who finance the courses, which last ten months.
“Directly on the ground”
Faced with a labor market that is very favorable to them, the young people enrolled have already been promised, through their engineering degree, rapid integration and good remuneration. So why bother doing these extra months of training? Between two courses, Carla Béguet, a graduate of the Ecole des ponts, highlights the dimension “becoming professional” from school, that he had lacked in his initial studies, to aspire to quickly reach positions of high responsibility in business.
You have 64.78% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
