Activities in the area of skill development

Learning and development

We highly encourage employees to pursue continuing education to further enhance their various skills. Employees identify their learning needs through a mixture of localized training matrices. These assist them in creating development-oriented action plans linked to career paths, competencies, and professional goals.

The four key competencies in which we encourage our employees to further develop are functional and technical skills, business skills related to effective work in the OMV Group, personal skills, and leadership skills. Our functional and technical training focuses on maintaining a skilled and capable workforce. This training is planned and delivered annually in line with our workforce requirements.

Learning on the job (graphic)

We encourage the use of online resources for training. The expansion of our online learning content enables employees to access more consistent training content and enhances its accessibility on a global level. We have seen that the use of online courses and online materials has doubled without a decrease in the use of face-to-face training channels.

The Learning module launched in our learning system provides a transparent and user-friendly tool for finding appropriate educational and development activities based on employee-specific development needs, registering for training, and tracking each employee’s online and face-to-face training history.

However, learning on the job remains an important element in employee development and training. We encourage employees to learn on the job, where they can apply their professional or educational skills to the specifics of OMV business and culture.

Our 70:20:10 approach gives the importance of learning on the job a weighting of 70, learning from others a weighting of 20, and learning from training a weighting of 10.

Leadership development

One of the People Strategy priorities is to strengthen leadership capabilities. We aim to ensure that our leaders continually grow and develop. In 2019, 113 leaders participated in our leader program which is designed to support employees taking on a personnel management role for the first time. 42 participated in the program which aims to support transitioning leaders in taking on their new roles. These programs were rolled out on a Group-wide basis.

We ran cross-divisional leadership workshops as part of a Group-wide leadership upskilling initiative. They were aimed at supporting a shared understanding of leadership and the role of leaders at OMV, fostering cross-divisional learning, and introducing our new leadership tools for employee development and succession planning. The cross-divisional workshops for all middle managers were attended by 496 leaders.

We also allow our employees to provide anonymous feedback to senior leaders and middle managers on their performance, leadership capabilities, and how they encourage compliance with the OMV Principles. As part of this 360° feedback program, about 200 of our senior leaders and middle managers received insights from employees. On a more personal level, we offer mentoring to provide employees with guidance on key career issues. In 2019, 34 mentors provided mentoring services at the Board and executive levels.