People. That’s what ManpowerGroup is all about. We place millions of people into new jobs every year; making a real difference to their lives and helping our clients meet their strategic business goals, in an increasingly unpredictable world.

With 3,500+ offices globally, we’re in a unique position to make a positive contribution to local communities worldwide. Our people volunteer their time, knowledge and experience to help others move up the career ladder and achieve their full potential. In fact, every day of the year, we provide a home for a wide range of community activities – from student mentoring, to interview and CV coaching; and from weekly homework clubs to university networking events, and much more.

Our commitment to empowering people in their career starts right here – at ManpowerGroup itself. We’ve created a high performing, collaborative, learning culture, where we can practice what we preach. By nurturing our people, they enjoy bringing their best selves to work – for the better of our candidates, our clients, and our local communities. Take a look at a few of the ways we’re empowering people in all four corners of ManpowerGroup:

Accelerating our Emerging Leaders

Building a sustainable pipeline of leaders globally is critical to the future success of all organisations. Our business is no different. So, in 2014 we launched our Emerging Leader programme. Combining stretch assignments, development tools, executive coaching and mentoring – this three year initiative builds leadership capabilities and provides on-the-job experience, for our leaders of tomorrow.

We’re already seeing the success of this programme. Our Emerging Leaders are more engaged in their roles, and are progressing in their careers. So much so, that 80% will be in a new role by the end of 2016. We’re immensely proud of their achievements, and our next cohort of Emerging Leaders is raring to go.

Shifting the ManpowerGroup needle for women leaders

We’re leaders at the World Economic Forum and active participants on their Gender Parity Council. So we’re all too aware that organisations are stuck in circular conversations about why we don’t have enough female leaders. There’s been a great deal of talk, but not nearly enough action.

Our talent strategy is crystal clear: an all-male succession bench just isn’t going to cut it. So succession planning and gender diversity are critical aspects of our People and Culture strategy. We know exactly where we want women to progress and by when: by 2020, 40% of our Executive Leadership Team and Key Leadership Team roles will be held by women.

Helping Millennials develop skills to stay employable

Millennials don’t always seek promotions – they seek progression. That’s why we invest in training, create new ways to learn on-the-job, and build opportunities for our people to move around the organisation.

To enable this, we launched our European Graduate Program in 2014. It’s a two-year experience where participants can develop new skills while working on national, regional and global assignments. They enjoy role rotations, mentoring and valuable exposure to senior leaders and peers in other locations and brands. So far, graduates have progressed into a variety of roles in marketing, operations and IT in countries across Europe.

Empowering people through upskilling

Nowadays, the skills businesses need are constantly changing. So we help our people stay ahead of the curve by making learning easy.

Our sustainable learning culture is well and truly embedded into our organisation. In fact, we’ve provided online training since 1998. Through our digital learning platform PowerYou, we offer 7,500+ virtual and blended courses – ranging from negotiation and management, to the latest training in IT infrastructure. Delivered bitesize chunks and continually updated, we make sure our people can learn what they want, where and when they want to learn it.

Building capabilities through career conversations

Naturally, career conversations are a critical component of people management. But it can’t just be a single conversation between an employee and their manager. It needs to be a series of conversations with a wide network of people, to address the things employees care most about.

At ManpowerGroup, ongoing career conversations between managers, our people and their broader network are an essential part of our collaborative learning culture. We develop coaching skills so our people can have effective career conversations. We share this insight with our clients too.

To find out more about how ManpowerGroup is doing well by doing good, download our 2016 Sustainability Report.