Working at Bayer: Excellent Perspectives

To meet our need for skilled employees, we hire apprentices in Germany in more than 29 different occupations. In total, we had 1,286 apprentices in 2022. We also offer trainee programs in various areas for those embarking on a career, and internships for students around the world.

Find your new training position at Bayer in Germany on our German careers website. All international job vacancies can be found on global careers website.

High Level of Vocational Training

Successful careers are the result of lifelong learning. That is why Bayer sees it as an important task to develop and train its employees. Because we are convinced: every employee has talent that needs to be encouraged. With the help of our learning ecosystem, we support our talents and promote a lively and effective learning culture at Bayer - with the highest priority!

Our talents are an important factor for the company's success. Fulfilling our ambitious mission requires a wide range of competencies, skills and knowledge. That is why we offer our employees a broad portfolio of development and training opportunities. In order to support their learning goals and interests, we have recently made relevant, entertaining and appealing learning content available via a learning experience platform. Our staff select the skills they want to develop, choose from tens of thousands of contents from free and premium sources, and determine how often and how much time they want to spend on learning - on mobile devices or desktop. We are continuously offering new contents - most recently additional thousands from the areas of inclusion, diversity, digitalization and leadership.

In addition, our employees have a wide range of further training opportunities available. We bundle our Group-wide continuing education offerings in the Bayer Academy, which offers professional training for all employees and has received numerous international awards. The Bayer Academy also offers courses designed to systematically develop managerial employees. The courses accompany the managers from their first leadership roles to future duties in senior management.

Training in ethical standards (e.g. compliance, and fairness and respect at the workplace) is mandatory for all employees (including employees of contractors). Participation in training courses dealing with product safety and quality is mandatory for all employees entrusted with tasks in these areas and is documented in the training system.

A wide range of ongoing training opportunities is available to our employees in the form of both e-learning and face-to-face training. Each employee engaged in an average of around 26 hours of ongoing training in 2022.

More information on ongoing training at Bayer is available in the Sustainability Report 2022.

With the “Create Digital Mindset and Skills” program, we support our employees in learning new digital skills in areas such as artificial intelligence, data science, design thinking, agile working and innovation. Over 10,000 employees have already participated in this program. To drive our digital transformation, 78% of our Group Executives have completed a digital training program, which was co-created with a leading digital business school.

We want to create an optimal working environment for our employees in all life phases. Ensuring the safety of our employees and the compatibility of private and professional life are of central importance to us.
 

Within the context of our demographic management, we take a range of steps to address the various challenges – including health and sports programs, flexible worktime models, age-appropriate jobs and knowledge management.
 

We support employees in balancing their work and private lives. We provide various programs to support employees, including flexible working arrangements (how, when and where employees work) and support for childcare and care of close relatives within the scope of local social and legal guidelines. In many countries, our commitment in this area goes beyond the statutory requirements.
 

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are developing an approach for when, where and how employees will work in the next normal. More flexible ways of working is a core theme throughout this ambition, embracing empowerment at all levels of the organization to define and shape a next normal that strengthens our business, best meets the needs of our customers and employees, respects cultural differences and complies with all labor law and tax law requirements. 

As a global enterprise, Bayer enacts uniform standards to ensure that employees are fairly compensated throughout the Group. Our performance and responsibility-related compensation system combines a basic salary with elements based on the company’s success, plus additional benefits. Adjustments based on continuous benchmarking make our compensation internationally competitive.

We attach great importance to equal pay for men and women, and to informing our employees transparently about the overall structure of their compensation.

Bayer compensates employees on both permanent and temporary employment contracts in excess of the statutory minimum wage in the respective countries, paying a living wage that is annually reviewed and specified worldwide by the nonprofit organization Business for Social Responsibility (BSR). That makes Bayer one of the first companies to commit globally to this concept. This also applies to part-time employees whose compensation was proportionately aligned with that of a full-time position.

Our compensation concept also includes variable one-time payments. In many countries, employee stock programs enable our staff to purchase Bayer shares at a discount. Senior managers throughout the Bayer Group are invited to participate in Aspire, a uniform long-term compensation program based on the development of the share price. 

Retirement benefits 

Alongside providing attractive compensation for their work, Bayer contributes to the financial security of its current and former employees. Retirement benefit plans are available to 78% of Bayer employees worldwide to complement national pension systems. The benefits provided depend on the legal, fiscal and economic conditions in each country, employee compensation and years of service.

Supplementary care insurance - Careflex

Due to demographic change and increasing life expectancy, the topic of care is becoming more and more important. As of July 1, 2021, the more than 23,000 employees at all tariff and contract levels of the Bayer Group in Germany, whose companies are subject to the collective chemical agreement will be covered against the financial risks of needing long-term care with the CareFlex Chemie supplementary long-term care insurance.

Mutual understanding and a company culture that leverages talented employees of various backgrounds and perspectives is an important success factor for the Bayer Group. We create an inclusive workplace where all employees feel welcome and contribute at their best. We will continue to seek out and promote the best talent and drive for a workforce that both reflects the highest quality of skills and qualifications, and our strong focus on inclusion and diversity. We employ people from around 149 nations.

 
In 2020, we further developed a more integrated talent management approach that uses an inclusive lens in our people practices and personnel decisions with a strong focus on diversity. We aim to increase female representation to 33% across our entire top management by 2025, and to 50% across all other management levels (including upper and lower management) by the same year. We then aim to increase the share of women in top management to 50% as well by 2030. We have also defined aspirations for other diversity elements, including generation, nationality, experience, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities for 2025 and 2030. Regionally tracked elements such as ethnic origin are integrated into targets in our country organizations.

Find out more about the implementation of our strategy on inclusion and diversity on our website - https://www.bayer.com/en/commitments/inclusion-diversity-at-bayer

Around 97% (2021: 97%³) of our employees worldwide either have statutory health insurance or can obtain health insurance through the company.

We maintain a global framework concept to promote employee health and quality of life called BeWell@Bayer. BeWell@Bayer expands the core aspect of health into a comprehensive approach, targets further health improvements in the daily work environment and is intended to help employees balance their professional and private lives. Health check-ups are an integral part of our health promotion initiatives.

³ figure as last reported

Bayer encourages a culture of candid feedback and encourages feedback in all directions: from supervisors to employees, between colleagues and from employees to supervisors.

Our managerial employees serve as role models and play an important part in promoting performance and further developing the feedback culture at Bayer. Supervisors have the opportunity to ask their team for feedback about their leadership behavior. The Leadership Pulse feedback tool helps them to understand how their team perceives them in their function as a manager.

Our employees have the opportunity to discuss company-specific issues and scope for optimization via various communication channels. We actively involve our employees in business processes through dialogue offers. Informing staff in good time and comprehensively about upcoming changes, in compliance with the applicable national and international regulations, is very important to us.

We measure employee engagement at Bayer by means of institutionalized feedback discussions and regular employee surveys. This enables us to monitor the effectiveness of our initiatives and implement any necessary improvements.

Our employees can submit Bayer-related questions through the internal crowdsourcing platform “WeSolve” to solicit innovative, interdisciplinary ideas.

To promote a culture of innovation at the workplace, two additional platforms for making work-related suggestions are available to employees in Germany: the Bayer Ideas Pool and the Ideas Forum. The suggestions made by employees on improving processes, occupational safety and health protection are rewarded and utilized.

As a socially responsible company, Bayer has long been committed to respecting and fostering human rights at various levels. The Bayer Human Rights Position is rooted in a globally binding corporate policy. We respect the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights and are a founding member of the UN Global Compact. Our LIFE values, BASE principles and our corporate policies on “Corporate Compliance” and “Fairness and Respect at Work” obligate all employees around the world to conduct themselves fairly and in a compliant manner in dealing with colleagues, business partners, members of the community and customers.

Read more about our responsible business conduct: https://www.bayer.com/en/sustainability/human-rights