Mission E is taking Porsche into the future as an employer brand as well. The company will hire more than 1,400 new employees in the Stuttgart region to work on the development and production of the first all-electric sports car from Porsche.
The company plans to recruit experts in the fields of digitalisation, e-mobility, smart mobility and vehicle connectivity. Porsche will also focus on recruiting production planners familiar with Factory 4.0 and digital production and will hire more than 100 IT specialists as well. In addition, the newly established company Porsche Digital GmbH will soon be offering 50 jobs to creative individuals in order to integrate the latest technologies into mobility solutions for the premium vehicle segment. Finally, Porsche will increase apprentice numbers from 150 to 220.
Porsche AG has doubled its workforce since 2010. The sports car manufacturer employed 26,200 people at the end of June 2016. The company has embarked upon a course of consolidation this year. However, its planning measures also include further continual growth in workforce numbers. This development is being driven by the Mission E model, which will go into production in Zuffenhausen at the end of the decade. However, additional knowledge, as well as a certain number of employees who approach things in a novel way, are also needed for the digital transformation that affects products and services, customers and retail operations, the company and its processes and people and culture.
“One can in fact describe what is going on now as a ‘war for talents'”, says Andreas Haffner, Member of the Executive Board for Human Resources and Social Affairs at Porsche AG. “We are in direct competition with other automakers and suppliers and IT firms in our global search for talented experts. Money alone is not enough to attract these creative minds. You also need to offer exciting challenges, an inspiring environment, the greatest possible freedom to create and, now more than ever, attractive programmes for the work-life balance. However, with the hiring of more than 1,500 college graduates over the last five years, we have shown that we can offer secure jobs with attractive career opportunities.”
Porsche’s attractiveness as an employer is demonstrated by the more than 140,000 job applications the company receives each year – 7,500 of them alone for the 220 apprenticeship positions offered.
“With the factory for the Mission E, we will usher in a new era with new technologies”, Haffner explains. “That’s why we’re hiring new people – but it’s just as important to improve the skills of our current workforce.”
This begins with training, where high-voltage technology and digital-electronic systems have now become very important. In order to be able to recruit as many highly qualified experts as possible from the company’s own ranks for the production of the Mission E, the number of technical-industrial apprentices will increase from 104 to 154 beginning in the 2016 training year.
