Human Resources

To successfully implement the Strong Rail strategy, we rely on adequate equipment and qualified, skilled employees.

• Due to demographic changes and the associated lack of skilled employees, it is becoming increasingly difficult to fill vacancies with qualified personnel. This in turn leads to risks such as loss of knowledge, which is particularly the case for rail-specific roles.
• We are counteracting these risks in particular by improving our employer attractiveness, implementing extensive recruiting measures, redesigning vocational and functional training (retraining), and expanding and digitalizing the qualification capacities and measures for strategic succes­sion planning as well as for effective knowledge management.
• In addition, it is important to determine the extent to which potential for automation could be explored and maximized in order to counteract the risks associated with a lack of skilled employees.
• DB Group has a relatively high annual need for new employees, which is reinforced by the selection model agreed under collective bargaining agreements.
• Especially against the backdrop of an economic crisis with unclear prospects, the personnel cost structure plays an important role in recruitment. Our target is therefore to always conclude competitive collective bargaining agree­­ments in terms of the labor market and the transport market.
• Ongoing collective bargaining negotiations with the GDL entail risks in relation to strike action and unscheduled wage increases, which may have an impact on negotiations with the EVG. The risks and consequences of this would need to be reevaluated depending on the progress made and the outcome.
• The crisis has affected the entire industry. This means that there is currently the opportunity to employ skilled workers who would otherwise not be on the labor market.

DB Group’s digital transformation is critical for the successful implementation of the Strong Rail strategy.

• New technical possibilities, in particular from the area of digitalization, are leading to changing job content.
• We put a lot of effort into identifying job profiles of the future and try to determine in good time the resulting implications for qualifications and support.
• The Covid-19 crisis has shown the extent to which qualification and training processes must have robust central synergies and be organized in a decentralized manner (such as the train drivers academy). We are responding to this through the continuation of our comprehensive digitalization initiative.

Both the increasing digitalization of work together with new demands of the younger generations and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrate the importance of modern working environments and new forms of cooperation for resilience and innovation.

• New work as a more modern approach to cooperation and leadership is being advanced as part of numerous ini­­tiatives and communities within DB Group, such as “People. Make. The Future.”, Digital Transformation, H-Future Labs, Agile Islands Network, Office 365 Learning
  Support Community and many more.
• Targeted diversity management promotes intercultural cooperation and intergenerational communication as well as an appreciation of people’s differences – the objectives are greater performance capability and creativity, better knowledge transfer and greater employer attractiveness, which can all have a positive impact on the capacity to innovate and the performance capability of DB Group in the long term.
• Our life-cycle-oriented HR policy gives us the opportunity to promote loyalty among employees in the long term. This includes flexible working time models and jobs designed specifically for the age of the employee, our employment security, new opportunities for participation and intensive work on the corporate culture.