CSR - SDG 4: Quality education
Technical education is essential to the realize the energy transition: the demand for technical professionals with the necessary knowledge and skills continues to increase, which is why increasing technical knowledge and skills development is an important theme for Enexis Group. We do this in two ways: on the one hand by offering access to high-quality, accessible technical education at different levels and on the other by continuously helping our own people to further develop their own craftsmanship and knowledge. Read more below about our teaching packages, our vocational school and our focus on lifelong learning.
We believe it is important to start building technical knowledge at an early stage and making the technical field attractive. That is why we develop teaching packages for primary schools, we work together with the Children's Council and we regularly give guided tours to primary school classes. After primary school, we hope to meet these children again further on in their education, where we encourage students to take a technical direction and offer teaching packages to increase the intake of technical education courses.
Together with various educational institutions we offer joint follow-up training for secondary school graduates to become, for example, a mechanic or engineer. We do this not only to train our own future employees: we also train students for other companies in the sector. In 2019 we expanded the training capacity at our Enexis Vocational School. We trained over 250 new employees in our vocational school programs and more than 20 employees at the Enexis Engineering Academy were trained to become fully-fledged engineers. We also provide guest lecturers for various study programs, we employ interns and PhD students, we often collaborate with higher education in joint research projects and one of our directors is a part time professor at Eindhoven University of Technology.
We believe it is not only important to learn in preparation for a technical career, we also believe that learning and developing during your career is important. That is why we focus in an Enexis-wide program on increasing the development and change capacity of our organization. In concrete terms, this means that our employees are continuously stimulated to learn and develop competencies, both through internal and external training programs. Each employee also receives an annual budget of 500 euros to promote their own learning. These efforts run alongside the regular internal and external training programs that focus on safety: safety training is a mandatory and essential part of the training program within Enexis. We offer these training courses not only for our own employees, but also for third parties such as contractors.