Vânia Coutinho follows her engineering dream

Vânia Coutinho is one of the young Mozambicans committed to contributing to the prosperity of her home country. But Vânia does not stop at will; on the contrary, she has invested much of her effort in acquiring the technical and academic skills that have enabled her to enter the extremely demanding world of the oil & gas industry. Born in Maputo 26 years ago, Vânia is now part of a team of IWOCS engineers. Without fear of the challenge. Because Vânia is a winner.

Engineering has not always been on her horizon. As a girl, she dreamt about architecture as much as she imagined herself a fashion designer. She ended up joining one of the most prestigious academies in the country, Eduardo Mondlane University, in Maputo, where she graduated in Computer Engineering, joining the TechnipFMC family in 2019. And he has no regrets. On the contrary.

Today, Vânia is one of four female students from a group of 12 engineers to have onboarded a one-year training program in Brazil and Norway as a part of the TechnipFMC program to train Mozambican young engineers in technical skills to build Mozambican capacity to comply with the high technical requirements of the Oil & Gas industry.

“Since I joined TechnipFMC, I’ve learned how large the Oil and Gas Industry is. I’ve learned how to be familiarized with the scope of work, the team involvement, the equipment required to process certain operations, and one of the most important elements – to understand and follow the procedure documents to execute them. I’ve learned as well how good and sometimes complicated it can be to work as a team, how to brainstorm ideas to solve a problem that may affect our production and/or how to make our customer happy”, said Vania, who is now attending an intensive training program in Brazil.

The training will support knowledge acquisition in the offshore installation of subsea trees, manifolds, control modules, and confirm skills through exposure to the offshore environment. And like the warrior she is, Vania is not intimidated by the fact that she is a young woman in a male-dominated environment.

“It´s not a big challenge or difficult so far. Since college time, there were more boys than girls, and what was interesting was Collective Intelligence and knowledge sharing”, she said. “Every time I can contribute and share my thoughts, ideas, or even solutions, I speak up. And If I have doubts, I ask for help and am not afraid to talk. And, so far, I did not face any kind of embarrassing situations, although as young people, we all like to play and joke,” added Vania, who loves gospel music, fast food, crosswords, and cinema. And her experience in TechnipFMC as well.

TechnipFMC which was awarded several subsea contracts by Total – Led Mozambique LNG Project for its Golfinho/Atum development offshore Mozambique, currently employs Mozambicans in a variety of positions, including Human Resources, Health, and Environmental, Finance/Cost controlling, Legal, Procurement, and Engineering.

An IWOCS – Installation and Workover Control System is a temporary control system used to commission, troubleshoot, or decommission subsea wells. Specialized equipment such as umbilical reels, hydraulic power units (HPUs), and winches are used to enable hydraulic and electrical control of subsea trees and related hardware.