Training and Education

Development and Prospects

One of the basic principles driving our People & Organizational Development function is “we make people successful.” In our dynamic, constantly changing market, this means that our employees have to take responsibility both for their work and for their personal development. We are convinced that their motivation and determination to succeed depends on their ability to see and pursue individual prospects for themselves. Individual employees’ knowledge also grows our organizational knowledge as a whole. For example, keeping up with the state of the art in the areas of information security and software development protects our technology lead, while professional customer care helps enhance customer satisfaction.

We therefore invest in wide-ranging learning and development measures and ensure our employees grow in line with the functions they perform. Activities here are based on employees’ individual “development journeys”. These are agreed during our annual staff performance reviews and their implementation is then monitored over the course of the year.

Among other things, staff development plans include the skills needed to perform upcoming tasks, suitable on-the-job or off-the-job measures, and employees’ personal development wishes and preferences. This reinforces employees’ readiness to take responsibility for themselves and willingness to learn, and ensures they can learn new things at every stage of their development. Our proactive feedback culture supports continuous learning and development. Our employees have the opportunity to take part in these performance reviews using a structured, systematic process and to obtain additional feedback themselves. In addition, managers in the independently run companies in particular hold individual development reviews with employees. This option raises awareness of the need for openness and reflection throughout the entire organization. As a result, feedback becomes a natural part of everyday work and can be used for continuous improvement.

We benchmark the success of our learning offerings by measuring satisfaction with and the recommendation rate for further education opportunities on the one hand, and evaluating how measures have been implemented at the individual employee level during the next performance review on the other.

Personal Development Opportunities

Campus

The Campus, our cross-enterprise learning management platform, bundles internal training courses, professional development offerings, and e-learning modules, giving staff quick and easy access to development opportunities within the organization. The system was updated in 2022 and was redesigned as a cloud solution. The focus was on providing as intuitive a learning experience as possible for our employees and, for example, on making it easier to search and classify the training courses and further education opportunities using additional filter options. This means that suitable further education offerings can be found more intuitively across all learning catalogs. As a result, we offer our employees, experts, and managers from all areas of the organization a wide range of training options in the areas of methodologies, soft skills, and professional knowledge. We assess all courses for participant satisfaction and recommendation rates to ensure we are continually improving our offering. We achieved an average of more than eight on a scale of one to ten for both categories in the reporting period, an indication of the high quality of the courses provided.

In addition to the interdisciplinary courses run by People & Organizational Development for all employees, experts, and managers, the courses on offer include training for segment-specific customer care units, courses from a technical training catalog, and other specialist training held by and for employees. Our staff have extremely specific, in-depth knowledge, and we want to facilitate contact between them and enable them to learn from one another. For example, it is important for us to also enable training on internal tools, processes, and methods, plus e-learning courses and presentations by and for staff. This allows topics such as information security and business process management to reach a broader target audience.

Specific Development Programs for New Recruits and Young Talent

We use our talent development programs for proactive personal development. Individual plans are aligned with the target positions concerned.

• „MyWay ^To “ enables junior managers to design their careers as managers or experts in a way that is both in line with our Corporate Values and reflects their individual preferences, by combining mandatory basic modules with selectable add-ons. Its success is due to participants’ commitment to the program, the support provided by HR, and management integration in development planning. Partly as a result of these measures, we were able to fill 66.2% of management positions internally in 2022.


• The one-year “Navigate” program is designed to ensure early on that highly motivated high fliers remain with the Company, developing their business mindset and skills, their powers of reflection, and their ability to give and take feedback from a very early stage. The goal is to develop their individual personal skills. A broad-based network of different role models drawn from within the Company allows us to demonstrate different career development paths and in particular to reflect together on taking responsibility. This enables participants to discover the personal development opportunities on offer.


• “Women explore” gives women the opportunity to increase their visibility and profile within the Company, to network more with one another, and to actively examine their personal strengths and their career and networking strategies.

Outlook

We will continue our learning journey in 2023. A two-day internal conference about learning – our “Learning Days” – was held in 2022 for the first time. This learning organization initiative was launched by an enterprise-wide project team (“Initiative Lernkultur”). More than 30 presenters and nearly 500 staff from across the enterprise took part in the two virtual conference days, which combined short internal talks and reports on lessons learned from employees with contributions by external lecturers and speakers. New learning formats and offerings for all Company employees are now being developed as a result.

Training and Education in Figures

✓ We are moving to centrally document the training offerings available in the individual areas, so as to make them available to a broader target group. This central list will also be used to further expand our reporting on the volume and types of training offered. The following table shows the training and education figures recorded for the last three years:

(1) No classroom-based training and education courses were held in 2020 because of the pandemic.

(2) The calculation methodology was adjusted for the 2022 reporting period. A full direct comparison to previous years is not possible since a broader definition was used in the past. The prior-year figures cannot be analyzed and recalculated retrospectively since the new analysis options only became available in the current reporting period.

(3) The information relates to all United Internet Group core employees: 2020: 9,638; 2021: 9,975; 2022: 10,474

In addition, our employees attended a total of over 560 external training courses, seminars, and conferences of varying lengths during the reporting period (2021: 900; 2020: 480) .

The decrease in training and education hours for employees in 2022 can be largely explained by the discontinuation of our mandatory enterprise-wide COVID-19 training. ✓