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Current 2008

München, 10/14/2008

BIS Academy: varied staff training opportunities under a single roof

Targeted personnel development strengthens employee bonding and safeguards the Group's competitiveness on a sustained basis.

The intensive personnel development at Bilfinger Berger Industrial Services reflects the Group's leading position in this still-young industry. Since the beginning of 2008, the BIS Academy has been pooling the wide range of courses offered for employee qualification. This virtual basic and further training academy provides a platform for the ongoing enhancement and intermeshing of all activities. The priority here is concentration on the specific needs of employees.

“Our concept for personnel development follows the principle of ensuring the competitiveness of the BIS Group in the long term through the continuous, targeted and needs-oriented further development of our employees at all levels”, stresses the CEO, Thomas Töpfer.  To ensure systematic basic and further training, target groups have been defined encompassing the level of managers, junior managers, project and site managers and industrial employees. The basic and further training courses are in turn geared to these target groups so that the programme range contains something for everyone. All BIS companies can avail of central courses offered generally by the holding company as well as decentralised initiatives on-site in the local units.

As of this year, the various activities for employee qualification have been pooled, both in terms of concept and content, under the umbrella of the BIS Academy. A central component is the Junior Management Team, which since 2001 has already established itself as a key element in the advancement of the junior management and is tailored to the needs of “high potentials”. Added to this are various trainee programmes, including international programmes, that among other things have been specially designed for graduates of technical courses and prepare the trainees for project management responsibilities. A further focus is the long-term partnership with the Berufsakademie Sachsen at the Leipzig State Faculty of Studies that was agreed at the start of the year and in addition to providing the funding for a lectureship position also entails the provision of support for the Service Engineering course. BIS AG is playing a pioneering role with this training initiative.

Networks for sharing knowledge
The BIS networks have also proven themselves very well. The networks, also called communities of practice, are platforms for active contribution to the exchange of information on specific topics. The networks are used and further extended as a centre of best practice sharing. Stepped-up internationalisation is reflected in the transnational dialogue practiced in these networks and the intercultural cooperation. The holding company's new conference centre fits into this model as a “centre of learning” and a “centre of networking” where management and employees meet at individual seminars and events.

The Company’s in-house pool of trainers is also to be extended for the wide range of personnel development measures. All training courses in the Junior Management Team have always taken place with the involvement of boards of management, division or central department heads and representatives from the local companies. The goal is to disseminate the extensive know-how of the BIS specialists throughout the Group, but particularly to the junior management – true to the motto: taken from practice for use in practice.

Also planned for this year is the introduction of e-learning. In addition to conventional learning within the framework of face-to-face sessions, greater and greater use is to be made of the possibilities for further qualification opened up by electronic media. As early as the autumn, the relevant target groups in Germany will be able to learn about corporate compliance via the Internet with special online tutorials. -learning will also be used in real-time for the key topic of HSEQ. “E-learning is extremely time and cost-efficient and very much accommodates our decentralised corporate structure”, says Michael Schmitz, Head of Personnel Development.

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