The new generation of Management
The first intake of management trainees to undergo DACHSER Asia Pacific’s Management Trainee (MT) programme have graduated, with all trainees having landed permanent management roles within the company.
Touted as a major success, the Asia Pacific Management Trainee programme was first rolled out in 2017 with its first cohort of management trainees. It has proven to be a valuable pipeline to hone future leaders, as well as train and develop employees.
Focused on the people
“To provide excellent logistics, you need excellent employees – and at all levels,” said DACHSER CEO Bernhard Simon.
“A company’s success is always determined by its people as they’re the ones who deliver the quality.”
Indeed, the German-based international company has invested a great deal in growing future talent and future management locally. One of the ways it has done this has been by providing fresh graduates with an opportunity to learn the ropes of the trade, while planning a career in the field.
By rotating through all the relevant departments as well as giving graduates overseas experience, management trainees are given the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of how the company operates, find their niche talent and foster a career under relevant guidance.
The programme has been a roaring success not in so much that all trainees have graduated, but in the fact that they have all settled into permanent roles that reflect their own strength and abilities.
The journey from a trainee to a leader of the company
The three graduates include Terry Yang, who has landed a role as Project Manager in the Asia Pacific Sales department; Wilson Chow, Team Leader in the Asia Pacific Contract Logistics department, and Remi Murciano, Route Development Manager in the Sales team in Malaysia.
As such, the programme has shown to offer some key benefits to trainees, which include a fast-track career, international exposure, a customised career path according to your interests. Most importantly, it upholds the core value that the company is investing in its people.
“On average, it normally takes five to six years for a fresh graduate to reach a junior management position,” said June Chung, Head of Human Resources and Administration Air & Sea Logistics Asia Pacific. “The trainees were hand-picked and we provided them with trainings and job rotations according to their talents and interests, all of the MTs from the first Asia Pacific MT programme are therefore fully ready and more than capable to take up a management role.”
Indeed, this is what makes the management trainee programme so attractive and highly coveted. Another draw is the international exposure that comes with the training. Management trainees are not only limited to the countries that they started out with.
Yang started his management trainee career in Korea, but eventually landed a role in Hong Kong, while Murciano started in Hong Kong and finally settled in Malaysia.
During the two-year programme, trainees rotate through different departments to gain exposure of the entire business. By the middle of the programme, the trainees usually have a clear idea of where their interests lie and will then be assigned to a relevant department for a more in-depth on-the-job training to prepare for a seamless transition from being an MT to a leader of the company.
Chow, for example, has developed his interest in Contract Logistics because of job satisfaction, he was offered the opportunity to join the Corporate Contract Logistics team in DACHSER’s Head Office in Germany, and rotated to local teams in Shanghai and Singapore afterwards. Because of the effort during the rotations, he landed in his long-term role efficiently and even able to lead his own projects.
The company sees great value in this programme because at the end of the day, it helps the company to grow by investing in its most intelligent system – their human resources.
“We have one of the most innovative IT systems in the entire industry, but we need our employees to design, implement and maintain the process,” said Edoardo Podesta, COO Air & Sea Logistics and Managing Director of the Asia Pacific Business Unit. “But even the most intelligent system needs humans to design it.”
The Asia Pacific Management Trainee programme is still on-going, with the latest Management Trainee, Siddhant Palkhedkar, expected to be graduated in Summer 2021.
