Training & Skills Development / Personnel Development

Material impacts, risks and opportunities

Qualified employees are essential if companies such as WACKER are to operate successfully. Specifically promoting training and upskilling/reskilling increases the future prospects of our employees and permanently increases their quality of life. WACKER encourages its employees to develop their personal potential, take on responsibility and develop ideas.

Strategy

Training and upskilling/reskilling, as well as employee career advancement, play an important role in our personnel policy. We focus on all employee groups and differentiate between training courses that are absolutely necessary to exercise specific functions and voluntary training that also contributes to personal advancement alongside professional development. We use a global documented procedure to regulate this. Responsibility lies with the central department for HR Talent and Skill Development.

Actions

Each Group employee participates in an annual performance review and development meeting with their supervisor. Together, they establish a personal development and career plan. At talent management conferences, we discuss potential further development of employees across departments and regions and, in so doing, encourage internal mobility. The concept and system for Performance & Talent Management was overhauled completely in 2024. The new concept, called “Grow Together,” was introduced across the globe in stages in 2025. It centers in particular on greater transparency and personal responsibility for individual development, promoting the cross-departmental and cross-border exchange of talent as well as the continuous improvement of our employees’ performance.

Most WACKER employees have a personal email address. This means that services can be accessed conveniently, also for employees working in production, via a portal on the intranet and also individually on mobile devices.

Vocational training is a key component of our personnel-development activities and has always been a focus of WACKER’s HR strategy. In 2025, 202 young people (previous year: 213) began apprenticeships at a WACKER site in Germany or at the Burghausen Vocational Training Center (BBiW). The company employs a total of 622 trainees/apprentices (2024: 620). At 5.5 percent, the percentage of trainees (ratio of trainees to Group employees in Germany) is on par with the previous year’s level (2024: 5.5 percent). In addition, the Burghausen Vocational Training Center provides training for around 20 companies other than WACKER. Specific legal provisions covering mechanisms such as minimum age and health protection already apply.

Employees can choose from a global catalog of training on expert knowledge and social expertise. This is particularly helpful for onboarding as well as development and career planning. Each employee spent an average of 22.7 (2024: 24) hours in training in the year under review. As all employees have to complete an annual training course that is relevant to their remit, 100 percent of our employees have undergone skills-based training.