Bringing in talent,
and helping them ‘Sell it’
People
Bringing in talent, and helping them ‘Sell it’
This innovative three-year programme – inaugurated last April – is designed to gear up fresh sales forces and get them up-to-speed on the business of selling Prysmian’s products and culture worldwide.
In the current global scenario, being able to gather and train a motivated sales force represents an asset comparable to the ability of providing customers with state-of-the-art products. Prysmian Group relies in its sales professionals to succeed in an extremely competitive global market.
Sell It is a three-year programme conceived to bring talent into the Company by offering them a permanent contract, a tailored training path and diverse opportunities for personal growth.
The programme will help professionals develop their careers – according to their performance and potential – fostered through specific training activities and mentoring schemes, with a goal to increase sales qualifications and encourage meaningful relationships with role models and seniors.
The newly-hired sales force will take part in a two-week induction in Milan; the first led by SDA Bocconi School of Management; the second aiming to deep dive into the business, to familiarise recruits with Prysmian’s top managers in order to teach key sales and managerial skills, and finally, to introduce Prysmian’s global HQ.
Ideal applicants should hold a degree in engineering, chemistry or economics and have spent at least three years working for the commercial sector of industrial or customer companies, in front-end sales, technical sales, key accounts and customer-care roles.
This extensive programme aims to find and cultivate the most talented individuals in the commercial sector, to allow them to make the most of their abilities and competencies. “Through Sell It”, underlines Fabrizio Rutschmann, SVP Human Resources & Organization of Prysmian Group, “our company confirms its intention to attract talented professionals. The development of human capital is paramount to guarantee the enduring success of our company, and represents one of the pillars of our corporate philosophy”.
The launch of the first edition of Sell It in February 2017 thus represented the starting point of an even deeper commitment by Prysmian Group in nurturing young talent. “This is the first time we have launched a recruiting and training programme dedicated to this kind of professional. Our capacity for growth in different markets deeply relies on the quality of our sales team”, continues Rutschmann.
We are certain that the strength of the Group, and the relevance of our international projects – developed with many partners – will be an interesting point of attraction for candidates”.
Sell It completes a set of three recruitment initiatives undertaken by Prysmian Group. This includes Make It, dedicated to early-career manufacturing engineers (which will see its third edition in fall 2017) and Build the Future, now in its sixth year, aimed at identifying the best recently-graduated talents and at training junior and specialist managers, through a three-year path.
As Hans Nieman, Prysmian Group Executive VP Energy Products, asserts, “Selling is understanding. Understanding the products we are offering, but also the business needs of our customers”. This position is echoed by Philippe Vanhille, Prysmian Group Executive VP Telecom Business, who confirms that “what makes a difference is to combine technical intelligence with a passion for engaging people”.
The next enrolment period is scheduled for December 2017.
Good people make good companies, and happy customers
So began a truly engaging and inspiring speech from Andrea Pirondini, Prysmian’s COO, to new recruits of the Group’s illustrious engineering career programme, Make It.
“Our goal is to make our customers happy to work with us”, continued Mr Pirondini during the last day of the ‘Make It’ career programme’s induction week in Milan. And these words sum up perfectly the Group’s general mission.
The Xperience Lab of Milan’s Bocconi University was the ideal location for a speech that was both a lesson in business transformation for the operations sector, and a collection of industrial and personal best-practice insights.
“Working in a factory environment, we have a high risk of forgetting that we are producing for someone who has very specific needs. So, our focus is on operations, which in our Group are highly decentralised, with 82 factories in 50 countries” underlined Mr. Pirondini.
“The last two years in our Operations sector has been dedicated to the ‘Fast Forward’ programme. We launched this programme to better rationalise our industrial processes, while leveraging on our strategic asset of being present across five continents: a condition that allows the Group to respond in a suitably timely manner to the different requirements of the markets around the world”.
Prysmian is constantly evolving in line with new and ever-changing technology. No subject could be more appropriate for an induction session, since the first thing new recruits will learn is to adapt to mutating circumstances.
“Digitalisation, IoT and telecommunications changed the world we’re living in. At Prysmian, we are very proud of our past, but we also recognise that some old legacies can be a burden that can slow down the system, and we have worked to change that. But we can evolve only if we act together, moving towards the same goals”.
As the COO recalled, “With Fast Forward we drew together new and existing initiatives, with a focus on increased value for the customer, alongside speed and adaptation across people, production resources, and production technology”.
Production resources were also an important chapter in Pirondini’s speech. “The strategy is very much about where to allocate these resources. Some years ago, we decided to invest for growth in selected areas of the existing business. And we made specific choices that are now starting to produce important returns”. One example presented is very telling – the telecom business. “In this sector, the market is giving us a lot of opportunity, in particular in the optical fibre sector where we will invest in excess of €50 million this year”.
But the world-leading position Prysmian Group now holds is a result of forward-looking decisions made back in 2011-2012. “Investing in optical fibres is now internally recognised as mandatory, but back then the situation was different; our factories weren’t profitable since costs were higher, the technology was not widely spread, and there was no sign of the current run to high-speed connectivity.
“We received offers from external buyers interested in our factories. It would have been an easy option to just sell them and concentrate on more lucrative markets. But we would have lost technology, expert people, and a great business opportunity.
“I remember our CEO saying during a meeting ‘I like to buy, not to sell’, so we rejected the offer, and we turned back to these factories, looking for a way to make them profitable again.
“It took some time, but our current operational organisation owes a lot to that decision...By making the right choices, we now have the expertise to create optical fibre networks able to answer to the needs of today and the years to come”, Pirondini concluded.
PRYSMIAN WINS EXCELLENCE AWARD
The Group’s Livorno Mare plant has been announced as the winner of the ‘Industrial Excellence Award, Italy 2017’ competition. As a result, it has gained access to the next phase of the competition – competing for a top European award for industrial excellence. This is the first time ever that the Group has joined this illustrious contest, established in 1995 to benchmark management quality for European competitiveness in the industrial and service sectors. And they’re in good company. IEA winners of recent years include the likes of Bentley, Volkswagen and BMW.
This year’s Industrial Excellence Award (IEA) focused on how leading European companies develop and deploy their digital enterprise strategies and create superior value to customers.
The selection of national champions is handled by one of the leading business schools in each of the involved countries – SDA Bocconi being Italy’s representative for the 2017 edition.
Prysmian’s Livorno Mare plant forms part of the Group’s Network Components Business Unit, and is a centre of excellence for the development and production of high voltage accessories.
PRYSMIAN HQ OPENED TO EMPLOYEES AND FAMILIES
More than one thousand people gathered in Milan for a momentous occasion – an open day that celebrated the Group’s brand-new, smart-working headquarters.
Almost 500 people took the time to pay a visit to the R&D laboratories, while at least as many filled the auditorium to listen to a narration of the history of the Company. Thanks to a brilliant Virtual Reality display, many were able to experience the laying of cables on the bottom of the ocean, as conducted by the Group’s cable-laying vessel, the Giulio Verne.
The event was a special way for the families of Prysmian’s people to get to know the place where their relatives spend every day of their working life. The new headquarters building has been built to mirror the new approach to work envisioned by Prysmian; one that makes sustainability, innovation and digital transformation its hallmarks.
