Prysmian Group Academy Celebrates Five Years

Created in 2012, it has trained over 1,500 individuals worldwide

Milan, 14 February 2017 – Prysmian Group Academy — the corporate university of the world leader in the energy and telecom cable industry — is now in its fifth year of operation. Created in 2012, also thanks to a partnership with the SDA Bocconi School of Management, it has allowed over 1,500 individuals of various nationalities to receive training from 50 SDA Bocconi faculty members, an equally important group of professors from some of the world’s foremost business schools and over 180 senior employees who, as teachers, decided to make their knowledge and experience available to the company.

The Academy is divided into two main areas. The first, the School of Management, aims at strengthening leadership and management skills. Created in partnership with SDA Bocconi, it currently also benefits from the collaboration of a solid international network of business schools that contribute to the development of the training programmes launched in the Group’s various regions: SMU (Singapore), Fudan University (China), University of South Carolina (USA), FGV EAESP (Brazil), Steinbeis University (Germany), Corvinus University (Hungary), ESADE (Spain), ESSEC (France), and Stockholm Business School (Sweden).

The second is the Professional School, a technical school whose nine Academies by function and 35 courses are aimed at developing and strengthening skills through their transfer from the most senior staff to their younger counterparts. The School also draws on several of the Group’s centres of excellence, such as the Manufacturing Academy inaugurated at the plant in Mudanya (Turkey) in 2016.

Prysmian was one of the first large Italian companies to found its own school dedicated to managerial and professional training, thus positioning itself as a major innovator in the field of company training. The Academy is a concrete tool for sharing managerial and technical best practices. Due to its international nature, it fosters an innovative, entrepreneurial approach to business and a shared spirit of diversity and integration. In addition, the spread of a common long-term strategic outlook encourages employee engagement from a sustainable perspective of talent growth within the organisation.

With this in mind, a research project focusing on company dynamics by SDA Bocconi was added to the over 350 days of training. Seven case studies were conducted of the Group’s main strategic challenges in its various branches throughout the world, in addition to didactic tools, simulations and various studies of strategic innovation and M&A issues.

“Above all with regard to our managerial training initiatives, we are highly satisfied with our partnership with SDA Bocconi and the results achieved in these first five years of the Prysmian Group Academy,” commented Fabrizio Rutschmann, SVP Human Resources & Organisation. “What sets a company apart are the individuals of which it is composed. This is why for us human capital is a strategic asset on which to base our present and build our future.”

“For SDA Bocconi, Prysmian is a complete partner,” explained Markus Venzin, Senior Lecturer in Strategy at SDA Bocconi and Director of the Prysmian Group Academy. “Through our collaboration with the Group, we have developed new ways of increasing the impact of advanced training on learning at companies. However, our collaboration with Prysmian is very extensive, moving beyond the training process, and is based on a desire for deep mutual understanding.”