Marco sees a different platform from his ITS placement office: three tabs — Projects, Companies, Self-discovery. All the mediation, audit, and company-CRM machinery his office uses stays behind the scenes for him. This story shows only what he opens.
09:30 — Lab
Marco is 21. He's halfway through the second year of an ITS Academy program in Meccatronica in Bergamo. This morning his class is in the school's lab finishing a vision-system integration on a small production cell — a Cognex camera reading a barcode, a Siemens PLC sequencing the conveyor, a six-axis arm picking based on what the camera sees.
It works. Two weeks ago it didn't. Marco wrote a good part of the PLC code and nearly all of the OPC UA bindings. The whole thing now sits in a Git repo plus a folder of CAD files plus a short video he shot on his phone during the first successful run.
13:15 — Lunch
He sits at a bar across from the lab, opens his InTransparency profile from his phone, and uploads the lot. The app asks him for one paragraph in plain Italian describing what the project is. He types five sentences. He adds his tutor's name. He adds the company that hosted the stage curriculare last semester.
Then he closes the laptop and eats.
Overnight — the part Marco doesn't see
The platform's AI reads his code, looks at his CAD files, parses his README, and skims the video transcript. It extracts a structured skill list:
- Siemens PLC — TIA Portal, Structured Text, Function Blocks
- OPC UA — server configuration, basic security
- Cognex VisionPro — pattern matching, calibration
- Industrial robotics — basic kinematics, ABB RAPID syntax (light)
- Mechanical CAD — Solidworks parts and assemblies
- Project documentation — README quality, version control hygiene
The skills aren't a checklist Marco populated. They are a function of what he actually built. The AI is wrong about one thing — it tagged "advanced safety system design" because his README mentioned a light curtain, but he only configured it, didn't design it. He'll downgrade that himself when he sees it tomorrow.
Friday morning — a message
Marco's phone vibrates at 09:48. A talent acquisition lead at an automation systems integrator near Brescia has sent him a message. His ITS Academy has switched message review on, a setting any school can turn on, on any plan: that is why the message went through the school's Mediation Inbox first, where a staff member approved it at 09:30. Without that setting it would have reached Marco directly.
The message is short. It references the production-cell project specifically. It mentions the stage company by name. It asks if Marco would be open to a short call about a junior automation engineer position.
Marco has never heard of the company before. He clicks through to the company's profile: a small systems integrator working in food-and-beverage automation.
Friday afternoon — the Decision Pack
Marco's career services tutor, who he has WhatsApped, sends him a one-line reply: "I've pulled the Decision Pack the company saw before they messaged you. Look at it before the call."
The Decision Pack is a PDF. Marco didn't write it. The platform generated it from his profile. It has:
- His skills, each linked to the artifact the AI extracted it from, and the projects a teacher has evaluated at his request
- His ITS program, his tutor's name, his stage company's name
- His grades as awarded, with the ECTS equivalent for anyone who doesn't know the Italian system
He reads it. It's accurate. And for the first time he sees his work described from the outside: skills he took for granted are there, each with the file it came from.
This is the part the HR consultants we talked to kept emphasizing. Showing yourself off doesn't help if you don't know who you are first. Marco is figuring out who he is by reading what an outside observer says about him — built from his actual work.
The call
Marco takes the call on Monday. He's nervous, but he has read the Decision Pack twice and he's not blindsided by any question. The company asks him to come in for a half-day trial in two weeks. He says yes.
Whether he gets the offer depends on the trial. Whether the trial happens at all is what changed when he uploaded the project files at lunch on Wednesday.
That's the platform from a student's seat.