Twelve students from the cooperative education programme have chosen to train as IT spe-cialists for application development. They will be gaining experience through work in various specialist areas at adesso while also studying at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Three apprentices are being trained as IT specialists for system integration and will be reinforcing the adesso IT support department in future. Among the career starters at adesso are six young women beginning as application developers and three apprentices for office management, bringing the total number of new female hires to nine.
“As an IT company with a predominantly male workforce so far, we are very happy to see the percentage of female staff increase through the nine women joining the company with the group of 21 career starters at the beginning of this training year,” says Dirk Pothen, adesso’s Executive Board member with responsibility for human resources. Pothen oversees “She for IT”, an adesso initiative aimed at inspiring women to choose a career in IT so as to further boost the number of female employees at the company in the long run. To this end, adesso of-fers training and qualification measures specifically designed to develop the potential of wom-en, including the Female Talent Programme, which prepares female employees for specialist and management roles at the company. Dirk Pothen says: “Experience has shown that female and male specialists do not have the same opportunities to fully develop their career potential in male-dominated organisations. The systematic and targeted support of women will allow us to increase diversity across all of our teams and hierarchical levels and benefit from this mix of experience, skills and qualities within the company.”
Hands-on approach through learning-by-doing
adesso offers apprentices and students from the cooperative education programmes a hands-on start to their professional careers. A key part of this is the direct involvement of these young talents in specific projects. As such, the future IT specialists and office managers operate on the mantra of “learning by doing”. This year, the adesso offices in Munich and Karlsruhe will be taking on apprentices in the field of application development for the automotive and banking business areas.
Vocational training at Germany’s Best Employer 2020
The three prospective office management assistants will be trained in administration and hu-man resources for adesso’s applicant management. Human resources is becoming increas-ingly important as the workforce at adesso continues to grow – despite the coronavirus pan-demic. This year, adesso was also able to attract attention as an employer by once again ranking among the best in the Great Place to Work® nationwide employer competition. For the first time since it began participating, the IT service provider was able to top two lists, taking home the title of Germany’s Best Employer (Deutschlands Bester Arbeitgeber) in the ITC sec-tor and of Germany’s Best Employer 2020 across all sectors (Deutschlands Bester Arbeit-geber 2020) in the “large companies” category.
At the beginning of the new 2020/21 training year, adesso SE (2,800 employees) will have a total of almost 500 junior IT staff, including 80 apprentices and students from the cooperative education programme as well as 420 working students. This corresponds to an IT junior staff quota of approximately 18 %. In 2019, 13 apprentices and students from the cooperative edu-cation programme started the new training year at adesso. By contrast, the company was able to fill 21 new junior positions (of 30 offered) in 2020, a year marked by the crisis surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.
Anyone who missed this year’s application deadline need only wait to grab their chance next year. Job offers for apprentices and students from the cooperative education programme are already available online for the 2021/22 training year at https://www.adesso.de/de/jobs-karriere/unsere-stellenangebote/. Among them are the positions for IT specialists in the coop-erative education programme, which adesso advertised this year was unable to fill.
