To support our company strategy and to ensure the success of our business, we focus on connecting with potential candidates, attracting the right people and developing our talents. With an integrated talent management approach, we foster a performance-learning and performance-driven culture at PUMA. We systematically evaluate all employees, develop them based on their needs, identify talents and prepare them for driving the future success of PUMA.
We conduct talent conferences globally every year to assess the entire PUMA workforce, including all levels of management. Employees are evaluated on criteria such as individual performance and competencies, potential, ambition, career progression and mobility. The targeted analysis of our employees’ profiles allows us to not only prepare individual development plans, but also to match internal talent with vacancies. This helps us to find potential successors within the company and to foresee and to address the future competency needs of our organization.
We can only drive our mission to become the fastest sports brand in the world and ensure PUMA’s long-term success with the right people. This becomes particularly important in a constantly changing and increasingly complex environment. Therefore, it is crucial that we are perceived as a top employer and attract external candidates who want to join the unique PUMA working culture. In order to connect with these potential candidates, we use digital platforms and social media for our target group-specific, individual recruiting measures, as well as our career website. Extensive networks of qualified applicants and up-to-date candidate pools help us to quickly fill vacancies.
We believe in nurturing talent within and therefore we are committed to promote the professional and personal development of all our employees. By doing so, we also ensure that our people have the necessary expertise to guarantee continuous growth and market competence. Life-long learning is a necessity, particularly in times of a rapidly changing world. Considering the 70-20-10-rule, learning is optimized when it is done 70% on the job, 20% learning from others and 10% training and self-study. We offer a large number of online and offline training courses and workshops that are standardized or tailored to individual needs. Fostering self-directed learning, we provide a state-of-the-art learning infrastructure integrated in the Human Capital Management System Workday for internal and external training courses. Furthermore, our employees have the possibility to create their own content and share it with other PUMA employees. Ensuring that everyone has access everywhere and at all times, Workday Learning is available on all mobile devices. In 2019, 15,827 employees worldwide participated in training courses and workshops with a total of 199,496 hours.
To prepare and motivate our staff for digital change, we have started to train employees to become ”agile coaches.” These coaches apply agile working methods, pass on their knowledge to other colleagues on site, have the right mindset, and are also available as experts on the subject. In addition to the management content already available in the ILP (International Leadership Program), we send our staff on external and internal training courses to learn agile methods such as Scrum, Design Thinking and KanBan. The high level of interest and steadily increasing numbers of staff attending these courses show that we are moving in the right direction.
Our PUMA leaders play an important role in fulfilling our mission to become forever faster. We are only able to reach our goals through their commitment and passion. They are responsible for driving and shaping our PUMA working culture and our success depends on their skills and leadership expertise. That is why we defined a set of leadership competencies, which is necessary to successfully lead a team in an increasingly complex and volatile work environment. To equip our staff with such competencies and ensure a common understanding of leadership throughout the organization, we designed the International Leadership Program (ILP & ILP²). PUMA leaders receive intensive training and coaching, including interactive learning, roleplay simulations and best practice learning, as well as joint projects. Areas of focus are in particular mindful leadership and agile working methods. The program consists of different modules, providing leaders with the opportunity to apply the newly acquired knowledge in between seminars.
Accelerating the progress of our employees is essential for organizational success. Driving that ambition, two selective development programs, Speed Up and Speed Up2, are designed to unlock the potential of our talents. To prepare them for the next steps in their career, we provide an intense curriculum, including cross-functional projects and tasks, coaching, mentoring, and job swaps as well as targeted training courses. Participants also benefit from exposure to top management and establish strong networks globally.
We are constantly looking for future talent we can develop successfully and pass on the relevant skills to take over challenging roles within the PUMA Group. A varied range of initiatives at universities, both locally and internationally, gives us the opportunity to approach potential employees and identify suitable candidates. Within a global work environment, we provide various options for graduates taking their first career step.
In 2019, ten dual-program students and trainees joined the PUMA Headquarters in Herzogenaurach. In total, PUMA had 42 apprentices and dual-program students by the end of 2019, majoring in a range of subjects, from International Business to IT. Another way of getting to know PUMA is an internship for students, in which they are given the opportunity to gain 6 months of work experience.
