“Traditionally, apprenticeships have always been very important to us. We focus on providing thorough and varied training which we find is the best way of bringing out the potential of our apprentices,” says Monika Mandl, Head of Corporate Human Resources Development at Gebrüder Weiss.
The international transport and logistics company currently offers six different career paths: freight forwarding agent, freight forwarding logistics manager, operations logistics manager, IT engineer, office manager and professional truck driver. The logistics company currently employs 233 apprentices at 30 locations in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
The company would also like to speed up the training of its own workforce in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, so it is supporting various projects there to introduce a dual education system – e.g. in Serbia and Bulgaria. That is why this autumn, for the first time, six students will be starting their freight forwarding apprenticeships at the Gebrüder Weiss branch in Dobanovci near Belgrade.
When it comes to apprenticeships, Gebrüder Weiss can look back on a long tradition: the company has been training its own apprentices for about 80 years and further on-the-job training has always been a high priority. Through internal and external training seminars, language courses, team-building activities and field trips, the apprentices acquire many different skills, both on a professional and personal level. Thanks to a rotation system, they gain an insight into different departments even during their apprenticeship, enabling them to build up broadly based knowledge and explore where their own main areas of interest lie. The internal online learning platform ‘myOrangeCollege’ also offers opportunities to learn at any time, wherever they are.
