Advancement of women, family-friendly HR policies

Volkswagen’s corporate culture places a very high value on both job and family. For Volkswagen, family-friendly human resources policies are a key success factor along the road to becoming one of the world’s leading employers. The Group proposed individual goals to raise the proportion of women at Volkswagen in Germany for the long term as part of a voluntary commitment.

A key instrument is the quota for the university graduates we hire. Volkswagen hires the year’s best university graduates in the necessary fields and takes into account the proportion of female graduates in the relevant subject areas. Averaged across all fields of study relevant to Volkswagen, the individual ratios produce an overall goal of 30% women among the university graduates hired.

Volkswagen aims to attract female students at an early stage: it uses its Germany-wide Woman DrivING Award and the Woman Experience Day to focus on female engineering and computer science students and graduates, so as to recruit them for technical positions at Volkswagen.

This increased proportion of qualified women joining the Company will enable us to steadily lift the proportion of female executives in the coming years. The Volkswagen Group is aiming to have 30% women at all levels of the management hierarchy in Germany in the long term. In line with this, the proportion of women increased there from 9.8% in the previous year to 10.2% in 2014. The first cross-brand Management Mentoring Program, designed to support women on the way to management positions, was launched in the reporting period, with 42 participants from the Volkswagen Group in Germany.

In addition, Volkswagen intends to raise the proportion of women among its skilled workers and master-level workers in Germany to 10%. In 2014, 25 women at Volkswagen in Germany took part in the master craftswoman mentoring program. Audi also supports and encourages well-qualified women at master and technician levels in their professional development towards executive level.

Volkswagen specifically targets recruitment of talented women by arranging special work experience days for young women in order to increase the proportion of female vocational trainees in the industrial and technical area from 21.8% to 30% in 2014. The aim of these events is to make training in industrial and technical trades more accessible for girls and to support them in their career choices. The Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Audi, Porsche, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, MAN and Volkswagen Financial Services brands have participated in the national “Girls’ Day” in Germany for years and offered 2,328 schoolgirls in the reporting period a behind-the-scenes look into careers in the automotive industry.

Volkswagen has offered participation in the Lower Saxony Technikum at its locations in Lower Saxony since 2012. Female high school graduates complete an internship in a specialist technical area and attend university lectures in parallel. In the past two years, 88% of the Volkswagen Technikum participants, 45 women in total, have opted to study technical subjects and nine of them are following a dual study program at Volkswagen.

In addition to hiring and supporting talented female employees, Volkswagen is attempting to systematically improve its employees’ work/life balance. For example, Volkswagen offers a high level of working time flexibility, a range of part-time and shift models, and ways of easing the transition back into the workforce for employees on parental leave. Teleworking and the associated use of new IT and communications technologies allow employees to find their own individual work/life balance.

Another step toward becoming a family-friendly company is the constant expansion of a range of childcare options. The Volkswagen Group’s experience at home and abroad with near-site childcare has been positive – at Volkswagen Financial Services AG or at the Volkswagen Group of America location in Chattanooga, for example. Childcare is also available during school vacations at all the Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Audi, Porsche and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles locations in Germany.