The refugees, from Afghanistan, Syria and Nigeria, will begin their funded internships at the start of November, alongside 12 other new interns. All funding for them was made available through Heidelberg. 

Heidelberg training manager at its Wiesloch-Walldorf plant Andreas Blum said: “The overall situation in Germany is that more than a million refugees came in the last year so Heidelberg as a company thought ‘What can we do?’.

“This was not only on the social responsibility side but also how can we benefit from the situation? So we talked internally with several agencies around Heidelberg and came to the point where we said ‘Okay, we want to set up something that can be really sustainable’.

“We don’t want to do a marketing thing and just hire 50 people, because we can’t give all of the 50 a contract. But now there really is a chance for every single one of these refugees to get a contract and that is what we want to focus on.”

The newly joined interns will spend three days a week doing practical training at the Wiesloch plant, in areas such as mechanics, mechatronics and printing technologies, as well as logistics, which Blum described as having “quite a demand” at the moment.

The other two days a week they will spend in college, with one of these days dedicated to learning German.

The successful applicants were initially invited for two weeks to Heidelberg’s main site in early August when they were interviewed and had their competencies checked.

Heidelberg has also announced that it will be taking on another 90 trainees, including the 12 new interns, into its training programme, 10 more than were taken on last year. 

These new trainees will be stationed in either Wiesloch or one of Heidelberg’s other training sites in Brandenburg, Amstetten or Ludwigsburg.

Heidelberg now has 341 trainees in its programme across all of its sites. 

“We have defined as a company some growth segments, which are service, digital equipment and also consumables,” added Blum.

“This is of long-term benefit to the company, so we have decided now to invest in the future, in training capability. We are pretty sure that because of the demographic situation at the company and in Germany, when you look at the future job market, we need these young people.

“Our goal is definitely bringing all that we hire into jobs at Heidelberg but of course this depends on the financial situation in three years and it depends on the performance of the young people.”

Last month, Heidelberg reported on a solid first quarter of 2016 despite a loss in revenue.