Average hours of training per year per employee

At Symrise we qualify our employees for their daily work via comprehensive training measures. Lifelong learning supports our employees throughout their careers.

German language instruction has played a particularly important role in integrating foreign employees. Furthermore, we offer English courses for our production employees and for employees of Tesium, among other things, so that they can use international work instructions. In the international range of training courses offered, occupational safety training and the handling of hazardous substances were given a wide scope of attention. Management training courses are also offered in all regions, supplemented by coaching and mentoring measures. In 2018, around 8,500 participants took part in internal and external training courses. Globally, the total number of hours for training courses amounted to around 66,500 hours (both disclosures without the Diana Group), so that each participant received an average of about 8 hours of training. Approximately 3,400 participants were women. In addition to traditional training programs, we also train our employees via international assignments. In 2018, the number of international assignments remained unchanged at the high level of about 120 employees deployed outside their home countries.

The training content also includes practical workshops specifically on sustainability for managers, who then convey to their teams the knowledge they gained.

We have also intensified investments in the training of future specialists. For one thing, we accepted 46 young people for initial apprenticeship training in 2018. For another, in cooperation with the local job center, we have trained unemployed individuals from outside the field as chemical production specialists. This apprenticeship training lasts about two years. In 2019, we want to launch a new initiative for the retraining of approximately 20 people as chemical production specialists.

As of December 31, 2018, a total of 140 apprentices and trainees were employed at our sites in Germany. This corresponds to a training rate of around 5.1 %.

At Symrise we spend about € 3.5 million annually for training and personal development measures, excluding the costs of initial training or wages and salaries during training.