As a company, we can only reach our goals if we attract, recruit, and retain talent for PUMA. Competing for the best suitable talent on the market, our intention is to raise awareness of PUMA as an employer of choice which offers challenging roles, while providing professional talent management and unique development opportunities.
It is crucial that we are perceived as an employer of choice 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. Last year, we optimized the candidate journey in our ATS Applicant Tracking System (Workday) to even better meet the needs of external and internal applicants. At the same time, we reconsidered our global recruitment standards, aligned and communicated with our P&O colleagues across all markets. Extensive networks of qualified applicants and up-to-date candidate pools help us to quickly fill vacancies.
We believe that our employees are the driver of their personal career journey. With an integrated talent management approach, we foster a feedback and results-driven culture at PUMA and a self-driven learning attitude. We regularly evaluate all employees, set up individual development plans, and identify the right people to prepare them to drive PUMA’s future.
We conduct talent conferences globally to assess the entire PUMA workforce, including all levels of management. Employees are evaluated on criteria such as individual performance and competencies, potential, ambition, and mobility. The targeted analysis of our employees’ profiles allows us to match internal talent with upcoming vacancies. This helps us to find potential successors within the company and to foresee and address our organization’s future competency needs. Last year, we were able to fill most of our key positions worldwide through internal promotions or horizontal transfers.
Our employees’ ongoing professional and personal development also ensures that our workforce has the necessary expertise both to guarantee internal growth and to drive the business. Therefore, we offer a wide range of training courses and workshops, both online and offline, standardized or specially tailored to individual needs.
Shifting our focus to a self-driven learning culture, we provide a state-of-the-art learning infrastructure integrated into the Workday Human Capital Management system for internal and external training courses. With the launch of LinkedIn Learning and Good Habitz, more than 16,500 different online training courses are available for personal and professional development across a wide variety of learning categories. In 2020, we continued to adapt our training offerings to the challenges resulting from the increased amount of time spent working from home. Learning content such as mental wellbeing, resilience, mindfulness, and emotional stability, which was also promoted through Home Academy, helps us as an employer to provide our employees worldwide with the best possible support during the pandemic. Due to contact restrictions, face-to-face training was largely replaced by virtual concepts to enable us to continue to provide this training. In 2020, 17,372 employees worldwide participated in training courses and workshops over a total of 122,256 hours.
Our clear goal is to build an agile learning organization. To kick-start this, we continued to drive our agile coach program where PUMA employees from all departments are trained in agile ways of working. First, best practices were generated in our business and resonated well with external and internal project participants. We have also piloted and evaluated a blended approach on selected training courses, which we will extend to additional training courses in 2021.
During this time of unprecedented change, the role that PUMA leaders play in fulfilling our mission to become forever faster has become more important than ever before. To reach our goals, we rely on resilient managers who can navigate through the crisis and master the new complex challenges the pandemic presents. The set of competencies we defined, which are necessary to successfully lead a team in an increasingly complex and volatile work environment, prepared our leaders well for the challenges faced through the pandemic. PUMA leaders receive intensive training and coaching, including interactive learning, roleplay simulations and best practice learning, as well as joint projects. Particular points of focus include mindful leadership, agile working methods, and diversity and inclusion. The program consists of different modules, providing leaders with the opportunity to apply the newly acquired knowledge in between seminars. To ensure seamless leadership development, most courses in 2020 were digital and participants connected with their trainers and peers through MS Teams.
Accelerating our employees’ progress 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 talent. To prepare them for the next steps in their career, we provide an intense curriculum, including cross-functional projects and tasks, coaching, mentoring, job swaps, and targeted training courses. Participants also benefit from exposure to top management and establish strong networks globally. Due to the current situation, we developed a virtual kick-off module for the third global cohort, which we identified in 2020, and will start in 2021.
Identifying talent at a very early stage is key to fostering the next generation of employees who will contribute to PUMA’s future success. A varied range of initiatives at universities, both locally and internationally, gives us the opportunity to approach potential employees and identify suitable candidates. We offer a lot of options within an international working environment, creating the perfect conditions for people starting their careers. In 2020, 14 dual-program students and trainees joined the PUMA headquarters in Herzogenaurach. In total, PUMA had 43 apprentices and dual-program students by the end of 2020, majoring in a range of subjects from International Business to IT. Another way of getting to know PUMA is an internship, where students are given the opportunity to gain six months’ work experience.
