The Institute
Companies and visits
Visits are the part of a program that tells best and gets organized worst. We explain how they really work, because whoever brings a group has to know what they can expect and what they cannot.
On this page
There are five doors, and only two of them can be booked
| Channel | Who opens the door | How much notice | Bookable on request? |
|---|---|---|---|
| The company's own visitor program | The company itself, through a ticket office or a form | Days to weeks | Yes |
| Innovation hubs and campuses | A dedicated visits service | Days to 90 days for the most requested | Yes |
| Employers' association | The regional industrial association | Months, and on a fixed date in the year | No |
| Open-doors event | Whoever runs the event | Fixed window in the year, usually November | No |
| Direct relationship | A teacher, a former student, a shareholder | Variable | Cannot be scheduled, and does not scale |
The first two can be put into an itinerary and guaranteed. The third and the fourth fall on fixed dates and do not move, so they only go in if the intake lands in that window. The fifth opens the best doors and is precisely the one that cannot be promised on a calendar. Anyone guaranteeing stops that rest on a personal relationship is guaranteeing something they do not control, and we do not do it.
What actually gets visited, with the count in plain sight
Of the 39 experiences built for the catalog, six have a factory working inside them while you walk through. The rest are corporate archives and museums, innovation hubs, campuses and studios.
The six with live production are the Ducati factory tour at Borgo Panigale, the Pagani factory at San Cesario sul Panaro, the Autostadt at Wolfsburg, the Concio di Amarelli at Rossano, the hydroelectric power station at Crespi d'Adda and the pasta factory at Gragnano, which on top of everything else opens to the public two days a year. The others are described for what they are, and they hold up very well. The historical archive of a living company, with its documents, its prototypes and its mistakes, in front of a group of entrepreneurial students is worth as much as a shop floor and sometimes more, because it teaches fifty years of decisions instead of ten minutes of a production line.
We do not write «visits to Italian companies» and leave it there. A corporate museum sold as a factory visit collapses with the first group that comes home and talks, and in our catalog every stop says what it is.
Not every stop in the catalog is confirmed with whoever receives the group. On each sheet the confirmed ones are distinguished from those still being confirmed, with the date of the last update.
How a visit gets prepared
Companies do not receive people who ask «can we come and visit you?». They receive people who turn up with written objectives and a proposed itinerary, and the guidance the industrial associations give their own member companies says exactly that: agree the objectives and the route with a named contact beforehand.
For us it became method. Every stop has a contact at the company and a contact of ours. The group's questions are written out in the days before and sent in advance. You arrive with an observation sheet that gets filled in on the spot and afterwards becomes a module deliverable. How many people fit is decided by the company, not by us, and that is why our groups run from 8 to 15 participants. Above fifteen, a good part of these venues forces the group to be split, the program changes and the cost per person does not fall.
What these visits are not
Going into a company is part of the taught program. These are classes delivered outside the classroom, with a written teaching objective, a sheet that gets filled in and a deliverable that comes out of it.
They are not a placement service. They are not internships or work experience. They are not job interviews. They are not a service for making contact with employers, and we neither promise nor arrange introductions for the purpose of being hired. If a relationship between a participant and a company is born during the stay, it is born between them and it is their business.
This is not a form of words chosen out of caution. Matching the supply of and demand for labor in Italy is an activity reserved to bodies entered on a ministerial register, and we are not on it and we do not do that trade.
This program does not lead to a qualification with official value. Istituto Belmonte is a private Italian training institute. Its programs do not award qualifications with official value in Italy or in Mexico and carry no academic credits. A certificate of attendance is issued.