Evaluating specialist staff and executives
2005 marked the second year of operation for our Group-wide performance management system. This enables us to open up the prospect of international careers within the Group, discover talented individuals and identify successors. The Board of Management and Human Resources Development took part in this year’s development conferences, which aimed to assess the potential of executives at levels two to five and to use this information when making deployment decisions.

Recruiting the managers of the future
We want to attract international talent to the Group. This is why we are cooperating with around 30 leading business schools, including Wharton and Yale in the eastern United States, the London Business School and the Indian Institutes of Management in Bangalore and Ahmadabad. The final element of our involvement at this level is the Chair of Logistics at the Chinese-German School of Postgraduate Studies in Shanghai.

AIESEC, the world’s largest student organization, named us their “Partner of the Year” for the second year in succession. We offered internships to around 100 students worldwide, and over 60% of the interns accepted an offer of a permanent position in the Group once their internship ended. We are also involved with the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin. This is a business school that was set up by German industry and, as one of the founding members, we use it to attract and develop executives.

We are also treading our own path with the DHL Logistics Management University, which we inaugurated in October 2005 in Shanghai. This is a management training facility that offers 7,500 places a year for employees in junior, middle and senior management positions and has proved especially popular in China. The aim is to turn out world-class logistics specialists who stay with us for the long term. As early as the end of 2006, the university will have trained around 2,000 students in one of 40 programs.