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Continuing Education and Life-Long Learning |
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Personal development is a priority at Miele. This company’s employees are its most important capital and they are invested in with passion. |
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 190 management staff learn at the 3rd “Competition” symposium. |
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Guest lecture by Dr. Alfred Hutterer, Trumpf Maschinen Austria
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The three pillars of continuing education at Miele
 The foundation for personal development is an annual employee meeting, in which development potential, further training possibilities and desires are discussed. Continuing education has three pillars: Internal development External development Open development Miele also actively supports a systematic development of management and specialists with the help of various programmes.
The Three Pillars of Continuous Education Within internal development, training programmes are offered in: Communication/Team Work, Organisation/Working Methods, Sales and Technical Topics, IT, and Foreign Languages. Employees can also attend external events, which relate to their specialist fi eld, as part of the external development. This generally concerns specialist topics that are directly related to the job. Every member of staff has the right to an annual skill enhancement as part of either internal or external development, so long as it is necessary for the fulfi llment or development of their role at Miele. In 2007, employees attended over 11,600 days of training courses, 8,700 of which were internal and 2,900 external.
 The vocational training programme forms the third pillar of personal development. In contrast to the internal/external development, these events take place in employees’ free time and are financed by Miele. They range from IT to foreign languages to relaxation courses. There were 2,781 participants in 2007; equivalent to 1,000 employees (some employees attended multiple courses). Miele places particular emphasis on the development and encouragement of management material. True to the principle of demanding and encouraging above-average achievements, Miele seeks to find futuremanagement amongst its own staff. A mentoring programme sees experienced employees give advice to the managers of the future, helping them with their careers, giving them contacts, supporting their projects and providing feedback. |
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 Challenges and Targets
Personal development is infl uenced by a range of factors. As mentioned above, demographic change also plays a role here. Further training concerns all employees at Miele, whatever their age. One example is the “Learning after 40” programme. In order to guarantee a high level of knowledge transfer, specialist programmes are to be intensified in 2008 and 2009. Since October 2006, a model project has been running at Lehrte in which employees who are about to go into retirement pass their knowledge onto their successors. Further education for managerial staff in practice
The symposium “Brainpool for Engineers” in Gütersloh has established itself as a new series of events at Miele. The thought of customers determining the design and technical features of products in the future makes the hair of some product designers stand on end. This is no longer just a vision for Dr. Johann Füller (Hyve AG). Füller devises concepts for companies that wish to collaborate closely with their customers. He firmly believes that in the era of Web 2.0, online communities provide invaluable potential as a source of ideas that can be integrated into the company's in-house innovation process. The tools required to this end were presented by Fuller as a guest speaker at the 2nd Miele Symposium on the subject of competitiveness. The symposium is a relatively young series of events at Miele, to which the executive board and Personnel Development invite managerial and junior staff from all Miele plants to Gütersloh once a year. The symposium is a platform for exchanging ideas and knowledge transfer for works managers and employees from Research/Development and Production alike. With 16 lectures followed by discussion, the subjects from the last series were customer demands, quality, value stream and methods. Thus, the 184 participants learnt about what processes from the Toyota car production in Japan could be successfully transferred to the production of washing machines and dryers at Gütersloh. "Target costing in the product design of vacuum cleaners", "Automation or simplification — the path to more efficient processes", "Quality improvement programme at the Arnsberg factory" — the titles reflect as examples the aim of the symposium: establishing an interdisciplinary Brainpool for Miele engineers.
Board member Dr. Eduard Sailer announced at the end of the event that the symposium would continue in years to come due to the overwhelming positive feedback from participants and the initial noticeable synergy effects. Measures to overcome the lack of specialist staff are ongoing processes. First, they are established and then continued so that they can effectively attract candidates. The first results cannot yet be put into figures. |
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It is a project based on the transfer of professional knowledge and one that embraces valuable life and professional experience. Since April 2007, a “corporate learning” project has been running with the aim of introducing streamlined teaching methods for all Miele locations across the world. In 2008, there are plans to install software that will help with the administration and management of further education.
In the 2006/07 financial year, every member of staff received an average of 8.05 hours of training. The average employee age at Miele is 43.4 years. One large challenge in the increasingly complicated world of work is the identification of promotion material and the encouragement of professionals with specialist knowledge. In order to guard against a lack of specialists, Miele employees are encouraged to systematically develop their technical, methodical, social and personal competences.
In order to keep in line with the growing internationalisation, Miele is currently establishing a “cross-border network” based on transferring management and leadership knowledge across borders and factory locations. Since 2006, annual internal symposiums have been taking place on this topic. The main aim of personal development goes without saying: to stay in touch with the changes to job requirements and roles in the company and with the needs and expectations of employees.  |
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