Training and Education

Development and Prospects

United   Internet’s human resources and organizational development motto is “We empower our staff, managers, and experts to do their best for the Company’s success.” In a dynamic, constantly changing market, this means that managers and employees have to take responsibility both for their work and for their personal development. United Internet is convinced that workforce motivation and determination to succeed depend on employees’ ability to see and pursue individual prospects for themselves. Continuous development on the part of individual employees also grows the knowledge available to the organization as a whole. For example, keeping abreast of the state of the art in the areas of information security and software development protects the Company’s technology lead, while professional customer care helps enhance customer satisfaction and retention.

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

Among other things, staff development plans include the concrete skills needed to perform upcoming tasks, suitable on-the-job or off-the-job measures, and employees’ personal development wishes and preferences. This boosts both employees’ individual responsibility and their willingness to learn, and also ensures they can learn new things at every stage of their development. The pronounced feedback culture raises their awareness of the necessity for lifelong learning and also enhances their motivation to develop further. Within the Company, employees have the opportunity to use a regular, structured, systematic process for their performance reviews and also to obtain additional feedback themselves. In addition, managers at 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 personal development.

Personal Development Opportunities

The UI-Campus, United Internet’s learning management platform, pools internal courses, training, and e-learning modules, giving staff quick, easy, and transparent access to development opportunities within the organization. The internal campus provides employees with an intuitive learning experience and makes it easy to search for training courses and further education offerings. In this way, United Internet offers employees and managers from all areas of the organization a wide range of training options in the areas of methodologies, soft skills, and professional knowledge. In 2023, the learning offerings were restructured to introduce learning paths. The move gives all learners maximum transparency about their booking status and allows them to see how far they have come on their learning journey at any time.

All courses are assessed for participant satisfaction and recommendation rates to ensure continuous improvement of the offering. The average score for both categories on a scale of one to ten was more than eight points 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 and managers, the courses on offer include training for segment-specific customer care units, courses from a technical training catalog, and other specialist training. The training program also includes training on internal tools, processes, and methodologies. These courses are offered by employees with the relevant in-depth specialist knowledge for other employees. This encourages knowledge sharing and learning from one another.

Specific Development Programs for New Recruits and Young Talent

Talent development programs aim to facilitate proactive personal development. This is why individual development plans are aligned with the target positions concerned.

• “MyWay ^To ” enables junior managers to design their careers as people managers or experts in a way that is both in line with United Internet’s Corporate Values and reflects their individual preferences. This is achieved by combining mandatory basic modules with elective add-ons. Its success is due to participants’ commitment to the program, the support provided by HR, and the managers’ integration in development planning. Thanks to these measures, among other things, it was possible to fill 62.6 % of management positions internally in 2023.


• United Internet’s “Navigate” program is designed to retain highly motivated high performers for the Company early on. The program supports them in their development over the course of a year, strengthening their entrepreneurial mindset and skills, powers of reflection, and ability to give and take feedback, among other things. The goal is to develop participants’ individual personal skills. A wide network of role models drawn from within the Company demonstrates different career development paths and reflects in particular on what it means to take responsibility. This gives participants concrete experience of the personal development opportunities on offer.


• The “Women explore” program focuses on raising women’s visibility within the Company, helping them to network and share information more with one another, and supporting them in actively examining their personal strengths and their career and networking strategies.


• The Discovery & Development Camp helps long-term senior staff to develop within their roles, enabling them to position themselves, their specialist and methodological knowledge, and their expertise within the Company and increasing their visibility.

Outlook

A two-day internal conference devoted to learning – “Learning Days” – was held in the 2023 reporting period. In the previous year, this initiative had been organized by an enterprise-wide project team, “Initiative Learning Culture,” and focused on the “learning organization.” More than 30 colleagues from the Company helped make the conference a success. Nearly 1,500 staff from across the enterprise took part in the two virtual days, which combined short talks and reports on lessons learned from employees with contributions by external lecturers and speakers. Building on the conference, new learning formats and offerings for all Company employees were developed over the rest of the year. This development will be continued in 2024. Going forward, the goal is to make learning at United   Internet more varied and more versatile by increasing the flexibility of training and learning formats and offering a growing number of short talks that can be integrated with listeners’ day-to-day work. In addition, 2024 will see the launch of enterprise-wide “LinkedIn Learning.” This will serve as a supplement to classic training courses, giving the organization's staff the opportunity to expand their skills and competencies through online video tutorials. Other focus topics for 2024 are establishing and expanding expertise in the area of digitalization and enhancing management skills with respect to people management, product-related, and specialist management.

Training and Education in Figures

The following table shows the training and education figures recorded for the last three years:

(1)   The calculation methodology was corrected for the 2022 reporting period. A full direct comparison to previous years is not possible since a broader definition was used in previous years. The figures for these previous years cannot be analyzed and recalculated retrospectively since new analysis capabilities only became available as from the 2022 reporting period.

(2)   The figure relates to all active United Internet Group employees (2023: 10,962; 2022: 10,474; 2021: 9,975).

In addition, United Internet’s employees attended a total of 906 external training courses, seminars, and conferences of varying lengths during the reporting period (2022: 560). The increase is primarily due to the fact that the subsidiaries in the Business Applications Segment were able to access these offerings for the first time during the reporting period. In addition, new training courses were created, and employees made greater use of the “Learning Days” and “Lunch & Learn” offerings.

The sharp rise in the number of education and training hours for service providers is due to the extensive courses given to new service provider staff in the Customer Care and Education Management areas.