Apprenticeships: Your training at Voith

In 2019, our Heidenheim trainees traveled to Nepal with their supervisors. Why Nepal? For years, Voith has been actively supporting the charitable organization “Zukunft für Nepal Ostwürttemberg e.V.” (“Future for Nepal Ostwürttemberg”). The charity is building a dual training center based on the German model in the region of Dhading.
Our trainees helped build new apprentice workshops for metalwork and carpentry. The center is completed by a school of general education and an integrated vocational school. The workshops now train welders and other professionals.

For our trainees, this was an unforgettable experience that they’re still talking about: traveling the country, helping locally, and creating opportunities where they’re needed the most. With their commitment, our trainees made a real difference.

Thanks to our trainees, our factory premises in Heidenheim have their own small hydropower plant: The “Alte Bleiche” has become an interesting display item for clients, employees, and the public. Our technical trainees in Heidenheim and Sankt Georgen, constructed and implemented the plant during their training in an interdisciplinary team with students of the dual university Baden-Württemberg. The small hydropower plant has an output of 35 kW and produces 286,000 kWh of green electricity annually, which we use directly for our factory production.

For our trainees to be able to build the plant on the river Brenz, some preparations were necessary: dike the river, rebuild the weir gate, and complete the concrete and steel hydraulic engineering works. For our Heidenheim location, our turbine generator unit StreamDiver was ideal, as it’s engineered for river construction with low gradients. This way, our trainees could work directly with the product and at the same time realize an important project that meets our claim to create innovative technologies with the greatest possible environmental benefit.

What would it be like to solve complicated problems with real projects? There’s no lack of exciting tasks for our trainees, as this special project proves. Our industrial mechanics-in-training in Heidenheim repaired and reinstalled for example the old water turbine of the Rappenmühle (Rappen-Mill) in Ballmertshofen – with historical assembly methods.

Voith’s Francis turbine had been working without interruptions since 1912 and had generated sustainable electricity for 106 years. After decades of operation, however, some parts needed to be replaced. The challenge for our trainees: making the necessary machine parts, but with traditional methods. The result: a success! Today, the Rappenmühle (Rappen-Mill) once more generates clean power and runs smoothly.