PERSONAL JOURNEY

As a company we can only reach our goals if we attract, recruit and retain talent at 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.

Recruiting

It is crucial that we are perceived as an employer of choice and attract external candidates who want to join the unique PUMA work culture. To connect with these potential candidates, we use our career website, digital platforms and social media for our target group-specific, individual, pro-active recruiting measures. Extensive networks of qualified applicants and up-to-date candidate pools help us to quickly fill vacancies. In 2021 we put efforts into the launch of a culture pre-check, which is a voluntary pre-test for candidates to find out if our unique PUMA culture is suitable for them.

Talent manAgement

We believe that our employees are the drivers of their personal career journey. With an integrated approach to talent management, we foster a feedback and results-driven culture at PUMA and a self-driven learning attitude. We regularly evaluate all our employees, set up personal development plans, and identify the right people to prepare them to shape PUMA’s future.

Talent conferences are conducted 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. Internal mobility supports the career development of our employees, especially cross-border. This is why our employees can upload their personal career profile on Workday, proactively set up targeted job alerts and apply for internal job postings with just one click. The “job alert” function in Workday allows us to display vacancies to employees automatically, which supports the visibility of career opportunities within the PUMA Group. As a result, we can see a significant number of internal moves including relocation abroad. Overall, in 2021 we were again able to fill 4 out of 5 of our vacant key positions worldwide through internal promotions or horizontal transfers and filled 29% of open positions with internal candidates. We see this as confirmation of our talent and development strategy.

DEVELOPMENT

Our employees’ ongoing professional and personal development also ensures that our staff has the necessary competencies to guarantee internal growth and to drive the business. Strategic workforce planning as well as Workday helps us to avoid skill gaps and gain transparency about the skills of our employees.

We offer a wide range of options for training and development, including courses and workshops, both online and offline, standardized or specially tailored to individual needs. Based on a lifelong learning approach fostering 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 LinkedIn Learning and Good Habitz, more than 18,000 different online training courses are available for personal and professional development across a broad variety of learning categories. In 2021 we received the award for the best soft skills e-learning offer in Germany together with GoodHabitz.

Learning content such as mental wellbeing, resilience, mindfulness and emotional stability helped us to provide our employees worldwide with the best possible support during the COVID-19 pandemic. We continued to adapt our training to the challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and developed hybrid concepts for all our previous classroom training courses. In 2021, 18,983 employees worldwide participated in training courses and workshops over a total of 436,734 hours. Therefore, we had an average of 29 hours training per FTE and spent € 201 per FTE on training, although most of our trainings are digital.

To achieve the goal of building an agile learning organization and expand the use of agile working methods even further, we offer digital agile coach programs for various target groups.

LEADERSHIP TRAINING ILP/ILP2/PLE

Our PUMA leaders play an important role in fulfilling our mission to become forever faster. To meet the new complex challenges in a volatile work environment, especially those presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, while still reaching our goals of delivering great performance, we highly depend on their skills and leadership expertise. To equip our staff with the necessary 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. Particular areas of focus are mindful leadership and agile working methods. This program consists of different modules providing the leaders opportunities to apply the newly acquired knowledge in between the seminars.

To rethink leadership in 2021 we introduced the PUMA Leadership Expedition, a new program designed to enable leaders to lead effectively in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) world. It is fully virtual, easily accessible and designed in a self-driven and self-tailored learning format with self-chosen Virtual Training sessions with a trainer and regular contact with other international participants in smaller work groups. Coached sessions are also included, as well as individual learning sprints with self-chosen Learning Nuggets and check ins with the trainers.

Our training from employee to manager is designed to specifically prepare employees who will be taking on a management role for the first time. In addition to the training module, this program also includes individual coaching, as well as pre- and post-learnings.