Simona Coco Head of Human Resources

Hi Simona! You are our Human Resources Manager. What was your course of study?

I started my university studies in Catania, where I was born and raised, but at the end of my three-year degree I looked my parents in the face and said: I have to go!
I felt like I was trapped in a wetsuit that was starting to get too tight and I realised I needed something more.
Fortunately, my family immediately supported me in my choice and I arrived in Milan where I obtained my master’s degree with a specialisation in human resources management.

Moving from Sicily to live in Milan must not have been at all easy. How did you experience this change?

Certainly being away from your loved ones and roots is not easy, especially if you are 22 years old. But I immediately realised that I had made the right decision both in terms of my studies, as I have always had a passion and natural inclination for relationships and all-round social/sociological issues, and for the city of Milan, which has allowed me to express myself at 360°, constantly offering stimuli to my inexhaustible curiosity. Today I can certainly say that I feel at home in Milan.

What is that thing you were looking for so much and found in Milan?

I left Sicily because, as I told you, the reality of my hometown was beginning to give me little stimulus, which for me have always been lifeblood, daily fuel. Milan certainly gave me a lot of opportunities and opportunities for growth and comparison right from the start.
During my Master’s degree, for example, I had the opportunity to do an internship at L’Oréal. It was an intense experience from every point of view, and one that made me realise from the outset what I wanted for my professional future: human resources management was my world, but the multinational context was not the right environment for me, who remains Sicilian in my DNA and a lover of authentic and familiar flavours. After my internship at L’Orèal, I continued for a few years in the world of consulting, particularly recruiting. I then returned to the company where I worked in the HR team for 4 years, mainly dealing with selection, personnel development, training and climate analysis for the Italian and foreign offices. It was an experience that gave me so much and to which I gave so much but which, a bit like what had happened in Catania several years before, made me realise that it was time to go.
I was ready to meet A+B Industrial Tools Company!

So tell us about your experience in A+B.

The meeting with the company I remember as if it happened yesterday. I am someone whose heart feeds my mind and vice versa and I need a working environment that gives me the opportunity to be there 100 per cent as a person and as a professional. I have never been able to be a mere bystander and far be it from me at work. I intensely need an environment in which I can express myself freely, have my say, take space, propose, think, confront and then ground, deposit. That was the first meeting with the company I remember, which immediately made me realise that this would be the right place. The HR department did not exist other than as personnel administration, so it was all about planning, studying, thinking, and making it work in full respect of well-established company values with which I identified.

How did you manage to reconcile your work with being a mother?

Being a working mother is never easy, under any circumstances. It is not easy because you live with a latent sense of guilt and perpetually torn between wanting to be the best both as a mother and as a professional. Fortunately, ours is a company that deeply believes in family and healthy, authentic values, and this framework allows me to be a mother and a worker without one sphere taking away space and intensity from the other. Indeed, perhaps the most beautiful aspect of my experience at A+B is that becoming a mother and my professional growth went hand in hand and mutually contaminated each other, generating the conscious personal and professional maturity that I feel I have today.
I joined A+B when I was a young woman with a thousand ambitions and a thirst and desire to give to the company and to receive. I find myself, after six and a half years, to be a woman no longer so young, let’s say, with two wonderful children and a career path full of satisfaction, of sacrifices full of passion, of love for what I have the opportunity to experience and do every day.