Audi has called hundreds workers from its San Jose Chiapa plant in south-central Mexico to its headquarters in Ingolstadt, Germany, in order to learn how the automaker builds its cars. The workers will be responsible for overseeing the production of the Audi Q5 when they return to the plant next year.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Audi has built a special training center for the 600 Mexican assembly workers and is putting them through a unique training program. All employees who were invited to Germany hold either supervisor or leader positions at the Audi plant, like 45-year old Isaul Lopez Gutierrez, a systems analyst for Audi.
“We have to make sure the quality is the same in Mexico as it is in Germany,” Gutierrez told The WSJ. “Audi is obsessed with quality.”
Gutierrez arrived in Ingolstadt last summer for training and will spend a total of two years there before returning home with his family. While he’s at Audi HQ he will learn German culture and study German language, in addition to learning work-specific skills.
Each of the Mexican workers are paired with a German ‘buddy’ who shows them the ropes. All of Audi’s plants are standardized so the things they learn at Audi’s Ingolstadt facilities will be directly transferrable to Mexico when the workers return to build the mid-size Q5 in 2016.
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