Regards croisés: is the university up to the challenge of industry?

With the start of the new academic year and the Show Industrie trade show just three weeks away, we meet two women of influence: Hélène Boulanger, President of the Université de Lorraine, and Nathalie Vaxelaire, President of the Union des Industries et Métiers de la Métallurgie Lorraine (UIMM), to discuss the close links between university and industry.

️ Read the full issue of jeem n°17 where this interview was broadcast.

Nathalie Vaxelaire: For the record, the Grand Est region is a land of industry, with 8,800 companies and almost 260,000 direct employees. Industry is the economic and social backbone of the region. And our country's sovereignty cannot be expressed without a strong industry, as the health crisis has made clear. And our industry is strong thanks to the skills and talents of the men and women who work in it every day. A professional career is not just about working for a company, it's also about training to acquire new skills that will enable us to meet the challenges of new technologies and AI, for example. And that's where the challenge of building relationships based on trust and proximity comes into play with the Université de Lorraine: how do we interact to adjust and build training paths? How do we build bridges between industry and researchers?

Hélène Boulanger: Today, there are 25,000 universities in the world, and the Université de Lorraine is in the top 1%, which is significant for a region like ours, with its strong industrial roots in mining engineering, energy, materials and digital technology. So it's only natural to develop close cooperation with industry. It's a hallmark of the university, whose development has historically accompanied that of industry. It also means feeding each other. We feed industry, and industry feeds us. I often point out that a quarter of all teaching hours at the university are given by external professionals, in particular staff from our industrial partners. So you can imagine: if we take away these cooperative ventures, a quarter of our training activity falls by the wayside! And our training courses are, of course, opportunities for young people after the baccalaureate, but also opportunities for people already in work who want to develop their skills. I would add that we also offer services to help companies innovate to meet their needs. For example, companies, whether or not they have their own R&D department, call on us because we have first-rate equipment or because they need our researchers to break through technological barriers that are preventing them from conquering new markets or staying competitive.

Hélène Boulanger: Absolutely and definitely yes! The University of Lorraine will be communicating to encourage its students to attend the Show Industrie. In my opinion, the industrial professions are often poorly known because of representations that are often very old. It's an excellent opportunity to bring young talent together with companies and industrialists, to bring these worlds closer together and to deconstruct representations of the world of industry that are often completely outdated.

Nathalie Vaxelaire: Absolutely! Our local industry is putting on a show this November. And it's a wonderful opportunity to be curious and to come and meet some fascinating and passionate men and women. It's also an opportunity to dare to change your vision of today's industry, and to let yourself think that a career in science and technology is for you. To tell yourself that you want to play a part in our society's energy and environmental transition, by helping to dream, develop and manufacture the technical solutions that already enable us, and will enable us even more in the future, to meet this major challenge for us all. I sincerely invite young people, families and guidance counsellors from the Eurometropole to push open the door of Show Industrie and come and meet us, and who knows... their eyes will certainly start to sparkle.

Nathalie Vaxelaire: Recruitment tensions are a daily occurrence in all sectors of the economy, not just industry. The reality and the perception of this reality are two very different things. I agree that the industry may have lacked communication: we are first and foremost engineers, technicians and managers, and not enough communicators. We've understood this, and both UIMM Lorraine and the industry's manufacturers are working hard to raise awareness of the industry as it is today: it's important to show our companies around, to encourage meetings with engineers, technicians and operators, so that they can talk about their jobs. We want to showcase our know-how, our workshops and our technologies. Our factories have changed over the last 30 years! We also want to raise awareness of our professions, which are just as accessible to women as they are to men, thanks in particular to advances in ergonomics and technologies that automate many tasks. Did you know that 30% of industrial workers are women? And that they are making a career of it? And then, what seems essential to me, is to explain the meaning of these professions, and the contribution made by manufacturing, innovation and production in our industries. As I said earlier, it's industry that innovates and develops the technological solutions required for our society's energy and environmental transition. Isn't that a great challenge!

Hélène Boulanger: Communication is at the heart of this issue! We have training capacities available in industrial fields that offer a wide range of job opportunities, but which are not being filled: maintenance, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, to name but a few... Attracting students to these fields is a task that everyone needs to tackle, because they correspond not only to the nation's needs in general, but also to the career prospects for young people, which are very interesting but often poorly known. Working in terms of communication means raising the profile of today's industry. We need to showcase these careers in the media, for example through role models. We need to strengthen the presence of women and men from the industry in the media, and showcase them in the same way as we already do for others who have made a name for themselves in politics, song, music or sport! We need to make them exist in a different way, by creating characters who can serve as benchmarks, while at the same time inspiring people to dream, and making the world of the industry exist through media content that doesn't directly promote these professions, as has been done, for example, for the profiling profession. If I were totally disruptive, I'd say we'd have to create a TV series!
This communication effort is not just a matter for the university. From secondary school onwards, we work with professional organizations and associations. But it's also everyone's business: teachers, public authorities, families and friends. We all need to act together in our local areas, particularly in favor of the most disadvantaged populations, where there is often a significant gap between what young people could do and what they dare to achieve. Indeed, there is a great deal of self-censorship: many young people refrain from doing things for social, cultural, psychological and economic reasons. Levers such as the development of apprenticeships and internships enable them, even as early as 3rd grade, to discover a world of which they have no idea, and to which they have no access either. The more opportunities there are for encounters, the more opportunities there are for deconstructing representations and building a picture of new possibilities that they hadn't imagined before.

Nathalie Vaxelaire: You're right to say that we need to reach out to young people. At UIMM Lorraine, we welcome almost 4,000 schoolchildren every year, in a fun way, to help them discover industry, techniques and technology. This is already a significant first step. We also take part in Show Industrie, an initiative of France Industrie Grand Est, which we mentioned earlier. We've just launched an action plan to promote gender diversity, with podcasts with @LaClenche (Thomas Mertz) and video capsules (with Républicain Lorrain and Lorraine secondary schools) soon to be published. We feature women engineers, technicians and operators who are passionate about their jobs. They speak from the heart about what they do on a daily basis, how they drive their company forward, how they create products, discover new technologies or assemble products. They also talk about their backgrounds, their careers, and what motivates and inspires them in their work. I'd like to focus on the video vignettes produced by secondary school students on the issue of gender diversity. They are accompanied, at our request, by a team of journalists from Le Républicain Lorrain, who explain to them how to treat a subject in an editorial way, ask questions, be curious and organize themselves so that, once inside an industrial company in their area, they can go and interview the men and women of industry. I think it's very clever to showcase industry in their own way, in their own words, based on their representations, and to provoke encounters and exchanges. Letting young people talk about industries in terms of what they have seen or felt is perhaps also the right way to encourage them to go further, by daring to be curious. Communication is the key. We can also mention the Semaine de l'Industrie (November 18-24, 2024) and many other opportunities that are commitments for companies. Hosting school classes during this Industry Week requires spartan organization, but everyone does their utmost, because we are aware of the stakes for us, for them, for society as a whole.

Nathalie Vaxelaire: Life itself is all about transformation and evolution. So is industry. It adapts, improves, questions and transforms itself. Industry is constantly innovating, gaining in responsiveness and performance. And yes, it is sometimes complicated to match the timing of new skills needs with the timing of the construction of university degree programs. That's why it's vital that we continue to work together, with industry and academia, to share the announced transformations as far upstream as possible. Collaboration with our UIMM Lorraine training center is also a real opportunity for us all to become more agile in rapidly adapting training content. We have the capacity to launch highly specific modules, even for small sections, to meet the skills needs of manufacturers.

Hélène Boulanger: At the university, we are also involved in a continuous improvement process, which is closely monitored by assessment bodies at least at national level. Through our partnerships with companies, we have very regular exchanges on these issues. Of course, we think in terms of the future, so that we can project ourselves into a future that is not immediate, which is always a delicate exercise. Sometimes we can be wrong: we imagine that a particular profession or skill will be indispensable in 5 years' time, and then it turns out not to be. That's why, within each training program, we have councils called "conseils de perfectionnement", which enable us to work with professionals in the sector and try to make the best possible adjustments on an ongoing basis, in line with the needs of companies and society in general. We need to move fast enough, but not too fast, because if we move too fast, we're taking students into a job market that isn't ready for them. And if we don't go fast enough, we'll have exactly the same effect, but this time because their skills won't meet the needs! So the adjustment must be permanent. We renew our overall training offer every 5 years, but we are constantly adapting our training offer. For example, the Université de Lorraine has secured funding for the development of a European-level artificial intelligence cluster. There is a training component and a research component, which are linked to first-rate industrial partnerships. This represents tens of millions of euros of investment to develop innovation, research and training in these fields. And this is going to permeate our entire training offer, because it's likely that no profession will escape this issue, with impacts of varying degrees: you're going to have artificial intelligence users in professions that aren't fundamentally artificial intelligence professions, and you're going to have artificial intelligence professions. We are constantly working to evolve and adapt our training offer to the needs of companies and society in general, but I would like to emphasize one point: our aim is also to train students throughout their lives, or to prepare them to train throughout their professional lives. What's important is that they are equipped to develop their skills throughout their working lives. We're also here to teach them how to learn.

Nathalie Vaxelaire: This point is crucial, because we're laying the foundations for an unprecedented openness of mind, because they're going to change career paths, because today people don't stay in the same company for 40 years. They're going to change, they're going to move, but they're also going to be able to progress because they've acquired the necessary foundations for this capacity to evolve. Companies also ensure that their employees receive training throughout their professional careers. As I mentioned earlier, technologies, tools and equipment change rapidly. Offering employees the opportunity to acquire and develop new skills also means enabling them to continue to flourish within the company. It's a win-win situation for both the company and the employees, who have acquired the foundations that will enable them to progress and evolve without difficulty.

Nathalie Vaxelaire: Women are already present in the technical professions in our industries, but we're not sufficiently aware of this. So yes, we do have room for improvement, and we're working on it. We need to make more room for women, without resorting to quotas whose effects can be pernicious. At European level, in terms of industrial activity, we are 7th in terms of feminization! So we can do better. We'll tell you all about it at Show Industrie. In this respect, I invite girls and young women to dare to embark on scientific and technical careers. We're going to show them that industrial companies are places of fulfillment, social mobility and meaningful work, where women already have their place...and there's still room for them! We're ready to commit to interviewing young women when we're recruiting. But I admit that it's not always easy when the number of women engineers only represents a third of graduates. Here too, we have a major challenge, along with the University: to get more girls to choose scientific and technical subjects. And it all starts in high school.

Hélène Boulanger: It depends on the course of study, because in some places we have the opposite problem, with too few boys, and this also happens in engineering courses.

Nathalie Vaxelaire: I couldn't agree more. But you have to admit that you have a lot of girls in the agri-food sector, whereas in the more technical sectors, there will be more boys, just like in IT. It's important that this becomes a focus of interest for them too.

Hélène Boulanger: The first computer researchers, the people who brought about the birth of computing, were precisely women. I think we all remember the story of those black American women at NASA in that wonderful film, "Les figures de l'ombre".

Nathalie Vaxelaire: We have many wonderful examples of women who have been advancing the cause of women for over a century. I'm thinking in particular of Marie Curie: two Nobel Prize winners and the first woman to head a university laboratory. It's worth remembering that she left her country to study in France, because in Poland women were not allowed to enter university. This is a benchmark example, and there are so many others! They are role models for today's young women, inspiring them to take up scientific and technical studies. And paradoxically, for many young girls, their interest in science leads them, more often than not, into the health field. We need to encourage them and stimulate their interest in industry. They're perfectly legitimate! They often have a reserve that honors them but does them a disservice. For example, I've often noticed that if you offer a man a promotion, he'll take it straight away. A woman, on the other hand, is more likely to ask questions about her skills in relation to the position. And if she thinks she hasn't ticked all the boxes, she won't go for it! We also need to help women gain self-confidence. Careers are open to them. For them too, there are nothing but opportunities!

Hélène Boulanger: The question of self-confidence is indeed essential. Perhaps we ourselves need to start by explaining to our female colleagues, to reassure them, that it's normal for them to be afraid of asserting themselves in what are sometimes still male-dominated worlds. In these contexts, it's normal and completely understandable to doubt ourselves. In fact, our self-confidence was not innate; it was built up day after day. It's legitimate, and we must share this wavering as a common cultural heritage. I agree with everything you've said, it's really a global effort to modify representations and open up the field of possibilities. As an academic, I'm bound to look at the statistics a little, and I can see that there's a global problem of gendered access to studies. More precisely, the higher the level of training, the fewer women there are. It's a fact: in doctoral studies, the percentage of women is still significantly lower than the percentage of women who have passed the baccalauréat, and even lower than the percentage of women who have passed the brevet. This is even more pronounced when we look at experimental and formal science or technology courses (remember that the humanities are also sciences). Here again, we have an overemphasized effect, since we don't have enough women going into these fields. I'm thinking of a recently published study which showed the effects of organized meetings between high-school girls and professionals, either from industry as such, or from research in experimental and formal sciences, or from the technological sector. The percentage of choices made after these meetings has increased significantly. This means that the more we enable these encounters to take place, the more we make this universe of possibilities a reality.
I'll say it again, the more we make our almost daily reality heard, the more we can prepare women for the obstacles they may face. It's our social context, rooted in the long history of women's status, that leads us to ask questions, to question ourselves and to doubt ourselves constantly. This is normal, and entirely understandable given our socio-cultural environment. So for me, the real question for women is: how can we transform this self-doubt into a force for changing the world? And this question must speak to all women, because it's what we do every day, most of the time quietly.

Her career in industry began in 1994 with an international company, Trane. In 2011, she became Chairman of Compagnie Ingersoll Rand SAS and Société Trane SAS.
President of UIMM Lorraine
Member of the Board and President of the Statutory Committee of UIMM nationale
Vice-President, Industry, CCI des Vosges
Member of the Board of Directors of MEDEF Vosges

Lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences at the Université de Lorraine, member of the Praxis team at the Centre de recherche sur les médiations - Crem.
Director of the Human and Social Sciences Collegium at Université de Lorraine from 2012 to 2017.
President, Université de Lorraine
President of the Université de la Grande Région
President of the Commission Consultative Nationale des IUT
Member of the Board of Directors of France Universités, Vice-Chairwoman of the Conseil de la Formation, Vie étudiante et Insertion professionnelle of France Universités.