“We have great professionals and trainers with a wealth of experience.”
FORMAL was born in 2005, when LA LÍNEA VERTICAL decided to create a training and research center on risks for work at height. Its prestige, rigor and excellence have made it a benchmark training center in our country. Especially, since 2017, when Lucas González Lazzaro (Córdoba, Argentina, 1979), currently head of Training at LA LÍNEA VERTICAL, took the helm of FORMAL.
“I have been with the company since 2015,” Gonzalez Lazzaro recounts. I started in Training in 2017. My training is as a technician in Occupational Risk Prevention, and I also have a degree as a mechanical technician of machines and tools, which I did in Argentina. I am from Argentina, although my accent may not sound like it. I studied Engineering, although I still have a year left to finish the degree. But beyond degrees, I have been a sales agent since I was 17 years old and I will die in sales”.
González Lazzaro landed in Spain in 2001, which is when he met Carlos Martín Díaz de Espada, founding partner of LA LÍNEA VERTICAL. “We knew each other on a personal level before we did professionally. Carlos gave me the opportunity to work with him. At the time, I was working as a salesman at a Ford dealership. And I decided to take that leap. I first joined sales of work at heights equipment and then we added Training, which was a department that had hardly any activity and was focused solely on internal use. That’s when we gave it the volume it has today.”
“We have significantly expanded the training portfolio.”
Currently, as Lucas González himself describes it, “FORMAL is a very complete training center and one of the most important nationally and even internationally, because we have also provided training abroad”. But, as he adds: “About FORMAL, we must point out that we started giving only ANETVA trainings in 2017 and today we have multiplied to other internationally recognized rope positioning standards, such as IRATA and GWO, the latter specific for the wind sector. But we also offer courses on the naval sector, rescue, first aid, firefighting, defibrillators… In other words, we have significantly expanded our training portfolio, and that has been a great contribution”.
Gonzalez Lazzaro’s role is very well defined: “My role is to be able to sell and explain to individuals and companies why this training is needed. And not only to convince them, but also to assist and advise them during the whole process and also about any documentation, for example, that the company may need. I deal with the customer from the first contact with us until it is finished and the invoice is sent. The whole process,” he explains.
“As head of training, I am responsible for the commercial and organizational aspects of both the training department and the sale of work at heights equipment,” he continues. Let’s say that I attend to the clients that come to us looking for training and at the same time I look for new clients. I also take care of the distribution of trainers in the three centers we have in Algeciras, Jerez and El Puerto de Santa Maria, the organization of the courses and the dates, among other aspects. We have great professionals and great trainers with a lot of experience and with the highest qualifications they can have”.
“The truth is that this is a very rewarding job.”
Training is essential for working at heights. Lucas Gonzalez argues: “The most important thing is worker safety. From there, another important thing is that they learn to work at heights. A worker not only has to be safe on the ropes, but also has to be able to do a professional job in a short time”.
The training manager of LA LÍNEA VERTICAL, at the head of FORMAL LIMITLESS, recognizes that “the truth is that this is a very rewarding job. I like to get in touch with companies and employees, as well as with individuals who want to get started in the world of heights. It is a very specific type of training, not very well known. It is a very particular world, and once the student or the companies that start in it get to know it, they do not stop growing within it”.
It is gratifying, for example, “to see that your 2017 students today have already climbed up to three levels in the various training courses and have a more than promising future. Or to see that small companies that went into vertical work are now large companies,” he says. In fact, he adds: “I say this from experience with students who came from being, for example, salespeople or clerks in a sports store, and today they are training workers at height and are extraordinary professionals.”
And, as he declares: “Working at heights is a job with a lot of future. We provide training not only in rope positioning, but also in wind positioning, with GWO certification. Today we are in a very particular stage because of the war in Ukraine and because of how technologies are changing, where clean energies, the wind energy world, has a huge future. Wind power training is becoming very important right now.”