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.
People are our enduring asset. To ensure PUMA remains the employer of choice in the minds of our prospects and external applicants, we use a data-driven approach to attract talent. We use analytics to review the past trends in recruitment, understand the key source of talent inflow and design our talent acquisition strategy accordingly. To support our strategy, we use digital platforms, social media as well as the PUMA career website connecting with talents globally. To ensure our talent pipeline is everlasting, we foster relationships with academic universities through career events, company talks, master classes, etc. to name a few. In 2022, we deepened our engagement with candidates through enhanced communication via exclusive PUMA digital events, where they had the opportunity to interact with PUMA senior leaders and provide their suggestions for improving the brand.
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-oriented culture at PUMA and a self-directed learning mindset. We regularly, at least yearly, 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, learning agility, ambition and mobility. The targeted analysis of our employees’ profiles allows us to match internal talent with upcoming career opportunities. This helps us build a robust succession pipeline within the company and to foresee and address our organization’s future competency needs. Our strong focus on internal talent mobility gives our employees the opportunity to develop professionally and gain cross-cultural experience, leading to an enhanced learning curve on a professional and personal level. We use digital platforms where our internal talents can find the opportunity of their choice that is just one click away. An example of this is the “Job Alert” feature in Workday, which allows us to automatically display job openings to employees, increasing the visibility of career opportunities within the PUMA Group. As a result, we can report a significant number of internal moves including relocations abroad. Overall, in 2022 we were again able to fill 3 out of 4 of our vacant key positions worldwide through internal promotions or horizontal transfers and filled 45% of open positions with internal candidates. We see this as confirmation of our talent and development strategy.
The continuous professional and personal development of our employees also ensures that our staff have the necessary skills to ensure internal growth and drive the company forward. Strategic workforce planning and Workday help us identify skill gaps and gain transparency into our employees' capabilities. We offer a wide range of options for training and development, including courses, workshops and coaching – 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 GoodHabitz, more than 20,000 different online training courses are available for personal and professional development in a variety of learning categories – available in up to nine languages.
Speaking another language promotes mutual understanding, creates connections and enriches diversity; it also enhances our internal mobility. While the global focus is on English, employees can also learn or improve another language, including for private use. In 2022, we increased our focus on language training and acquired a global Busuu license covering fifteen languages. All our employees, including retail employees can now learn a new language online in a self-directed and flexible way according to their needs. Learners are supported by certified trainers in live lessons, individually and in groups. We received the eLearning AWARD 2023 in the category “Best Roll Out Project” for the implementation of this project. To help employees integrate locally, PUMA also offers weekly language courses in a classroom on the office premises, so that employees no longer have to commute to external courses after work and can integrate more quickly into a local environment.
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 current challenging times. Our hybrid concepts for all of our existing classroom training provide flexibility and ensure that employees can learn in the formats they prefer and that are right for them. In 2022, 16,216 employees worldwide participated in training courses and workshops over a total of 117,433 hours. This resulted in an average of 7 hours training per FTE and € 247 per FTE spent on training, even though 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 continue to offer our digital agile coach program to employees worldwide. By the end of 2022, over 130 employees from all over the globe have completed the program since its launch. Based on three levels of training – Agile Rookie, Agile Facilitator and Agile Coach – we focus on a need-based training to equip the right people with the right skills. Various business units and their teams are actively applying Agile principles as well as Agile frameworks, such as Scrum, Kanban, Design Thinking and OKRs in their day-to-day business and strategic planning.
Our PUMA leaders play an important role in fulfilling our mission to become FOREVER.FASTER. To master the new complex challenges in a volatile work environment and at the same time achieve our goals of excellence, we highly value their skills and leadership expertise. We have designed the International Leadership Program (ILP & ILP²) to equip our staff with the necessary competencies and ensure a common understanding of our leadership culture throughout the organization. PUMA leaders receive intensive training and coaching, including interactive learning, roleplay simulations and best-practice learning, as well as joint projects. Special focus is placed on mindful leadership and agile working methods. The program consists of various modules that give managers the opportunity to apply their newly acquired knowledge between seminars.
In 2022, we fostered our new PUMA Leadership Expedition program designed to enable leaders to lead effectively in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) world. It is fully virtual, easily accessible and based on the key concepts of self-driven learning, nugget-learning, learning sprints, and peer-learning. A healthy mix of trainer-led virtual sessions, and self-driven learning with a pool of more than 130 one-hour learning nuggets allow our leaders to decide what they need to learn, when they want to learn, and how they want to learn. The entire program is based on Learning Sprints that consist of trainer-led sessions, self-driven nugget learning, retrospective sessions with coaches and group assignments to achieve the highest possible learning and transfer success. We are very proud to have been awarded with the eLearning AWARD 2023 in the category “Agile Learning” for this innovative training.
For employees who are taking on a management role for the first time, we offer a PUMA-tailored training “From employee to manager” to prepare them for their new challenge and ensure a common understanding of leadership at PUMA among all newly promoted leadership talent. In addition to the training modules, this program also includes individual coaching and pre- and post-learning online.
Accelerating our employees’ progress & retaining talent is essential for organizational success. Driving this 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 and targeted training courses. Participants also benefit from exposure to top management and establish strong networks globally. In 2022, the fourth global group started its Speed Up/Speed Up² journey.
We are constantly on the lookout for future talent that we can successfully develop and equip with the relevant skills to take on prospective challenging roles in the PUMA Group. A varied range of initiatives at universities and career fairs 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 work environment, creating the ideal conditions for people starting their careers.
In 2022, six dual students and seven apprentices joined the PUMA Headquarters in Herzogenaurach. We offer dual study programs in the subjects, International Business, Fashion Management, Business Informatics, Accounting & Controlling and Digital Commerce Management. In cooperation with different universities, the students get theoretical background while gaining valuable practical experience in different teams at PUMA. Our apprentices either train as industrial clerks or IT specialists. They are working in various departments of the company to develop personal and professional skills and broaden their knowledge while regularly attending vocational school. In total PUMA had 45 apprentices and dual students by the end of 2022.
Another way for young talent to get to know PUMA is through our internships and working student positions. Students from all over the world are not only given the opportunity to gain six months’ work experience, but also build a network and sharpen their skillset. By the end of 2022 roughly 140 Interns and Working Students were part of the PUMA family.
