We promote people's personal and professional development through different initiatives that allow us to manage knowledge and take advantage of employees' abilities to achieve the group's objectives. Continuous training is one of Viscofan's primordial goals for its personnel, thereby boosting personal and professional development. With this aim, the Human Resources team managed more than 130,000 training hours in 2019 (115,000 hours in 2018), an average of 28.2 hours per employee (24.8 hours in 2018).

For this commitment to human capital training, the group has invested €2.6 million (€2.2 million in 2018), of which €0.8 million (€0.7 million in 2018) correspond to training and explicit awareness in health and safety (more information in the workplace safety section).

The industrial nature of Viscofan needs to combine a great number of labourers with specialised staff. This is an increasingly demanding and global industry in terms of requirements, which requires greater knowledge and expertise of the workforce. To take on this challenge, the Group constantly invests in staff capabilities, added to the continuous training effort carried out in the organisation. 

Within the training plan, subjects related to aspects of human rights have been addressed, such as the use of non-sexist language, corporate social responsibility, gender equality and sexual harassment, for a total of 2,163 hours, compared to 2,247 hours invested in 2018.

Training is carried out according to the skills and abilities of the people who make up the Viscofan Group and the needs of the job, and there is no record of the professional category in all the Group's companies that carry out training. By way of example, and in order to assist in the comparability of the information below, the number of hours of training by category that have been carried out in Spain, the headquarters of the corporate group, is broken down as follows: 

Facilitating training is one of the most effective measures to encourage the employability of our people, both for the development of their career and for opportunities for professional development that may arise. Looking towards promoting employment, the Group also fosters participation in the main universities of the countries where it develops its activity. Within the objective of attracting and developing talent, there were an average of 55 internships in 2019 (the same as in 2018).

In line with the results from the Work Environment surveys, the purpose of the Viscofan Group is to forward development of a personal high-performing culture and evaluate the established objectives through a performance assessment process. In particular, performance assessment is a process of planning, monitoring and evaluating the objectives that are defined by each person responsible with each member of their team. This methodology improves the professional capacity of each person and aligns individual expectations with the strategy and objectives as a company. 

In 2019, 43% of the Group's staff was subject to a performance assessment process, compared to 31% the previous year. The breakdown by gender and professional category is as follows:

The Group promotes bilaterality in evaluation through multiannual global opinion surveys (Viscofan Opinion Survey). In 2018, the third opinion poll of the Viscofan Group was held, with 70% of employees from around the world taking part, to learn more about our strengths and our areas of improvement. As strong points, workers pointed out quality and customer service and sustainable commitment. Certain aspects in need of improvement were also detected, such as remuneration, internal communication and the development of careers and training, on which the Group is developing initiatives as mentioned above.