Advanced Training

WACKER enables its employees to take part in advanced training courses, developing their particular strengths while targeting specific groups. The company motivates its personnel to continue learning throughout their professional lives and encourages them to be flexible in adapting to change. At least once a year, employees and supervisors discuss employee development measures in performance reviews. This approach applies to all levels of the corporate hierarchy.

In 2020, WACKER invested €4.9 million in personnel development and advanced training (2019: €8.5 million). This decline of around 42 percent was largely attributable to lower costs for external and internal advanced training courses during the pandemic.

Training for a Diverse Workforce

The WACKER Group’s Kompass training program (available in German only) has a wide range of offerings to help employees build on their professional skills and make progress with their personal development. Diversity and inclusion play a key role in the learning program. Female employees at all hierarchical levels can take part in programs developed especially for them. The company aims to promote the professional development of its female employees with seminars like “What Helps Women Get On.”

Another important topic is cross-cultural collaboration. To make the most of the opportunities such collaboration promises, we offer our employees intercultural training courses, for example.

Enhancing Digital Skills

Since the start of the pandemic, we have further expanded our range of virtual personnel development courses. Examples include “Working, Leading and Living in Times of Change,” which is designed to provide managers and other employees with support in coping with the pandemic and the changes planned in connection with our Shape the Future efficiency program. Under the slogan “Creating the spirit of tomorrow – shaping change together,” Personnel Development offers not only interactive formats and videos, but also a digital toolbox complete with checklists, guidelines for workshops and change management presentations.

Amid the challenges posed by the transformation of working life, numerous new formats promise opportunities to learn, e.g. with the inspiration workshops of what is known as our Broadcast series. In these one-hour online sessions, employees can share their ideas with their colleagues and experienced teachers on issues like trust, conflict-handling strategies, virtual collaboration, communication, and effectiveness and self-organization when working from home.

During the pandemic, in-person training has not been possible in the accustomed form and many employees have been working from home – meaning demand for, and expectations of, digital training and workshops have risen. A virtual training course on this topic provides employees with information and support for turning their existing in-person courses into successful online formats.

Employees across the Group can access a broad array of topics via a newly established international online library that comprises over 1,000 e-books and audio books by well-known authors. The wide range of subjects covered includes, for instance, “Working successfully in virtual teams” and “Working from home with children.”

At our Silicon Valley Challenge in 2019, 19 participants from around the world spent a month in California developing digital projects and deepening their knowledge of business model innovation methods.

Regular information events on digitalization are held in Burghausen and Munich, broadcast to sites around the world and subsequently made available via the intranet.