We are committed to supporting the learning and development (L&D) of our employees, both to support their own career development and to strengthen the levels of experience and skills within our workforce.
Our L&D programme is designed to appeal to all employees and ensure that they have equal access to the opportunities offered in the business. We regularly review the programmes on offer to ensure that they remain appropriate to the needs of our employees and of the business. During the year, we completed a strategic review of the L&D offer across the Group and refreshed and re-launched the offer in line with the findings. The refreshed offer saw improvements including a new core L&D offer for our Travel and High Street Head Offices focusing on technical and personal career development, and in addition to this, we continued our focus in stores enabling the development needs of potential Supervisors and Store Managers. In addition to the L&D programme, WHSmith is also an active supporter of the Campaign for Learning’s Learning at Work Week.
We are keen to develop our future managers from within WHSmith and so we work to ensure there is a pipeline of talent available for all managerial roles. We aspire to 90 per cent internal succession rate across the business. In order to achieve this, we hold regular succession planning meetings for store, head office and distribution centre staff, where we identify those individuals who have the ability to develop themselves and our business.
Our succession planning process enables us to identify areas of the business where further investment is needed to build a pipeline of talent. One such need arose in our Travel head office and saw the establishment of a Graduate Development programme during the year.
Succession planning is also a key issue in our Distribution Centres. Responding to this, we successfully trialled a new apprenticeship programme within our Swindon Distribution Centre. The programme has now been expanded to include our Birmingham Distribution Centre. Going forward we hope to further expand the programme to our Dunstable Distribution Centre and that we will start to see the apprentices move on to take permanent roles within the Distribution Centre teams as they complete their training.