Guido Martino, Corporate Design Manager for Piping, is only 36 years old but has already spent almost half his life working at the company. He’s taken part in numerous company projects around the world but admits that he prefers those jobs which come with greater professional challenges!

"Be careful what you dream of because it can come true!" These are the words that Guido Martino shares with young professionals or students aspiring to become engineers, and they reveal a great deal about his own story. Hard work, effort and natural curiosity have forged his path of growth in the company to his position today as Corporate Design Manager for Piping, a promotion he received barely a few months ago.

Now 36, Guido is a Mechanical Engineer who joined Techint E&C when he was only 19 years old as a JT, a Junior Technician, with a degree from the National Technological University of Buenos Aires. Later, he worked as Piping Designer, then Piping Engineer and then as Head of the Piping Department since December 2017. Just a few months ago, when his boss retired, he proposed Guido as his successor.

Throughout all these years, Guido has been part of many unique projects within the different subareas of his specialty. He’s worked in Rabigh for Aramco, at ESSO Clean Fuels, Sábalo, on the Hydrodesulfurization project for YPF CILP, in Pascua Lama, Fortín de Piedra and Dos Bocas, among many other major company projects. He’s rotated through various engineering offices all around the world, including Milan, from where he worked for Egypt and India.

He also had to work for the Pesqueria project. “It’s about a thermal cycle, which seems straightforward enough, but the problem is that the steam is at 565° C and you can’t pass it through just any pipe. We had to study and learn, try things out and make mistakes so we could correct them,” explains Guido. However, he’s quick to point out that this is the best way of training up and strengthening a team. “You learn so much more on a technically challenging project than on one where you only have to learn a couple of new things.”

He considers that every fresh project is a grand new adventure, although he naturally prefers those that present greater challenges. Fortin de Piedra, for example, was one of his most intense experiences. The whole thing was built in just 18 months, which had a huge effect on the group—and on Argentina. On one occasion, he remembers being invited to the Planetarium in Buenos Aires to give a presentation of the project, complete with slide show and special effects, for high-school students. “We’ve all got amazing stories to tell about that project. So many extraordinary things were done. Other projects, even larger ones, simply haven’t had this kind of impact. It’s touched so many other things. It’s like a flag, an iconic masterpiece for the company,” he described.

Shortly after completing two decades in the company, Guido was on the move again. “Techint E&C is a really good place for people with a restless spirit. Opportunities and projects come out of the blue, and you have to do your bit to see how you can contribute and what you get out of it. You can be sitting in a chair just doing what you were told to do, or you can get up and go looking for knowledge, seeking innovation, how to make improvements, meeting other people, and seeing how to find a solution to a particular problem. The truth is that these projects are so colossal that they’re constantly offering you the chance to feed the little curiosity bug that’s nibbling away at you!”

One of the things that most motivates him is seeing how, every day, there are large numbers of people at work driving the same engineering project. “It’s seeing how we can do what we always dreamed of. The technical process is a creative one. There are formulas that you can calculate and particular ways of doing things, but all of that has a creative component. Otherwise, all plants would be pretty much the same.”

For Guido, one of the most exciting things about his work is that “what we do doesn’t just stay on our desk, but becomes reality. The results can be touched and seen. And that’s when you really take stock of what you’re doing. These are developments that are applied to a design on paper that later become a three-dimensional reality, a construction work. That’s what makes us different, and what makes us so passionate about what we do.”