Technology & Innovation

Meet The Faces of Frigeri

Frigeri is not simply a workplace where people go every day; it is an highly energizing place to work.
As a small family-owned company, the Frigeri community offers its extra-ordinary people all the warmness, relief, understanding and protection a family owes to its members, in a work atmosphere where the continuous sense of well being and mutual recognition favours good work and the free influx and exchange of talents, skills, knowledge, experience and passion in everyday work.

CLAUDIO
Senior Toolmaker
Joined Frigeri in 1983

Good Morning Claudio. The seniority of your Frigeri belonging, which makes you a veteran, even if you are still quite young, forces me to ask you an unconventional and only apparently easy question: what is your job?

When people ask me what is my job, as you are doing now, and how long I have been doing it, they make me smile. When I think that I am here in the company since 1983 I myself am surprised and every day continues to be different from all the others that went before it. In response to my statement of my long service in Frigeri, my interlocutors’ reactions are often naive and something like “So much time?” or “And are you still holding on?”. But when I answer that I am a toolmaker, the reaction is invariably one: “Which kind of job is it?”

So: would you explain us too which kind of job is being a toolmaker?

It has been lots of years, but it is still difficult to me to explain that. I can only state that it is a wide-ranging job, which bunches different duties and responsibilities and that it is possible doing it successfully only if you bear with good practice, with discipline in making the best of the gained experience and lots of passion.

Our business VP, Mr. Roberto Di Zitti, often keeps repeating that proficiency development is a process that can not be levelled out and restricted in one or two dimensions, but it has to be constantly kept three-dimensional: in fact, it depends not only on what I learn from what I do, but also and mostly on what I learn while I am looking doing something and on everything I commit myself to learn outside of I do and of I watch doing: which is potentially unlimited.

My long experience says me that it is true: I have learnt and every day I keep on learning so much from my excellent colleagues and I believe that the most part of my daily work effectiveness comes thereof.

Let’s come back to the basis and let’s stay simple, then: Claudio, do you like your job?

It has been 28 years since I started here and I still do the same job with energy and passion, This means only one thing: that I like my job, it involves me and it does not bore me in any way. Don’t you think it is awesome?

ENRICO
Senior Toolmaker
Joined Frigeri in 1990

Hi Enrico. Here I am in front of another Frigeri veteran. Does that sweat on your shirt mean that even today you have dispatched another impossible mission?

I hope so, but still we are wrong: I will check it later. Toolmaking is a really complicated work, which needs great collaboration among all those people who are involved. Everyone has clear duties that have to be executed in the best way in order to let everybody realize an excellent end product. Everyone has to pull his weight in the same direction for the same goal. If there is a secret to gain success in our job, I am sure this is the right one.

How did this adventure in Frigeri and in toolmaking start?

I started in 1990 as apprentice. My really good tutor, now retired, to whom I am really in debt, was able to get his huge experience and his will to do across to me and with this inheritance I still feed my job today.

As years are passing by, I think I have fulfilled my dream of toolmaker, or rather to manage to be qualified and independent in developing assembling steps and activities and testing tool sets. It was really my secret dream and I am proud of having it made.

You have spoken about qualification and independence and this is referred to the learning and the personal growth issue. Do you too believe, as someone states, that in toolmaking there is nothing more to learn?

I don’t think so at all! On the contrary I am completely sure that such nonsense is only useful to those who want to hush up their conscience!

Each day, each hour brings something new you can learn. After all, Customers’ requirements, ever-new and more and more daring, daily try us out with more and more complex tasks which force us to constantly revise what we know, what we believe we know.

But the biggest satisfaction, for me, when you have to face a building problem which seemed to be impossible to solve, is in the end to have the possibility of saying: “It was really hard, but I made the grade!”.

What you are saying seems not to be a mere opinion spoken by an insider, but it is an attested love declaration for our trade: toolmaker by love. Do you fit in with it?

Yes, absolutely and I take it as my own statement. Thanks to hard, but also gratifying, daily fight against defects and also thanks to a constant exchange of ideas and knowledge with my colleagues, the toolmaking job lives in my heart. Forever.

ANTONIO
Junior Toolmaker
Joined Frigeri in 2011

Antonio, you are the last baby Frigeri community received: would you like to tell us how are you here and what are your impressions about the company?

All my gratitude goes completely to Frigeri managers, because they wanted to let me get into the job market, in a firm where not only I have found lots of people of high value, but where I can also do a job which seems to me every day more interesting and really stimulating.

Looking at your date of birth, I think I can say you are very young: from the point of view of relationships, what was your first idea about Frigeri?

All my collegues in Frigeri have granted me great helpfulness and their precious aid in learning this complex and wonderful job. I have also been so lucky in having found in my tutor Claudio a real friend and person who was always careful, who knew how to give me a boost and to get behind me with kindness and strictness and to encourage me in this way in doing my best every day. I am really lucky in going in such a goog firm as Frigeri is.