Attraction and Retention of Talents
Our ‘employer of choice’ status continues to garner worldwide recognition and helps us to attract, retain and engage industry-leading talent to sustain the company’s success and growth. In 2019, adidas locations around the world leveraged our employer value proposition for attraction, retention and engagement strategies. Amongst professionals, this work contributed to several top rankings worldwide, including the Glassdoor ‘Best places to work’ awarded for 2019, the LinkedIn ‘Top companies to work for’ as well as various Universum ‘World’s most attractive employers’ rankings among business and IT students worldwide. adidas offices across Europe, Asia and the Emerging Markets qualified for the certification by Top Employer Institute for their efforts to provide an exceptional work environment for our people. Among others, the certification recognized the company’s Learning and Development framework, which encourages different kinds of learning and the career management model.
We offer a range of programs at entry level to ensure future employees can have the best possible start, choose between a wide variety of learning opportunities, build on their strengths and improve their professional skills:
- Apprenticeship and Dual Study Program: The adidas Apprenticeship Program offers young pupils who want to join our company directly out of school the opportunity to gain business experience in a two- to three-year rotation program. It includes vocational training in retail, shoe technology, IT or other areas. In cooperation with various universities, the Dual Study Program for young school graduates offers theoretical and practical experience at adidas in fields such as digital commerce, finance or IT including at least one three- to six-month international rotation. At the end of 2019, we employed 50 apprentices in Germany (2018: 55) and 49 Dual Study Program students (2018: 45).
- Global Trainee Program: The Functional, Digital and Design Trainee Program is an 18- to 24-month program providing graduates with an international background and excellent educational credentials the opportunity to start a functional career within adidas. The program comprises assignments in various functional and cross-functional departments. At least one of these assignments takes place abroad. At year-end 2019, we employed 67 participants in our Global Trainee Program (2018: 61).
- Internships: Our global internship program offers students three to six months of work experience within adidas. In line with our ambition to optimize the experience for interns, we enhanced the overall recruiting process and added interactive collaborative exercises such as hackathons to the program in order to further enrich the cross-company experience. Consequently, we offered fewer but more focused internships in 2019, employing 216 interns in Germany (2018: 447).