The Nestlé Academy

The Nestlé Academy was launched in November 2011 to grow our own pipeline of high performing talent, to develop the future food leaders of tomorrow.

We recognised that our talent processes needed to change to reflect both internal and external factors for example our main barriers were;  young talent not accelerating through the organisation, limited entry points and a lack of coordination across development programmes combined with the rising tuition fees and increasing youth unemployment. Whilst the food industry is the largest manufacturing sector in the UK, we know that more than 50% of our skilled manufacturing team will retire over the next 15 years.

In addition, the industry as a whole has a perception issue, with many people assuming our employees predominately wear hairnets and wellington boots, there is no career progression and the food industry is mundane. 

Because of this, we struggle to compete with other manufacturing industries to recruit new talent. 

As a result, we recognise the need to revitalise our strategy to attract and engage more young people with the wide range of interesting and exciting career opportunities, within Nestlé and across the food and drink sector more broadly.

In 2013, a European wide commitment was launched entitled The Nestlé Youth Employment Initiative; in order to help at least 20,000 people across Europe under the age of 30 find employment by 2016. The Youth Employment Initiative opened up our business to young people with roles offered across all areas of the business and at all levels – from operators on the factory floor to field sales assistants and business management.

In the UK, we committed to creating 1,900 opportunities over three years. To date, we have created over 1000 opportunities for young people across a number of functions through apprenticeships, internships, work placement /experience and graduate positions. We have superseded our target so far and are on track to achieving our three year target.

‘To succeed in an industry as fast-moving and vibrant as ours, we need to attract a new generation of young, talented people. This exciting new initiative, which builds on the success of the Nestlé Academy, is designed to help us do just that’.

(Fiona Kendrick, Nestlé UK & Ireland CEO)

The Nestlé Academy has mostly recently been recognised externally at the London AGR Student Recruitment Awards 2015. We were delighted to win 3 awards in the following categories, Diversity & Inclusion Strategy 2015, School Leaver Strategy 2015 and Best of the Best 2015 for the most progressive in our industry, both in terms of initial vision, execution, use of stakeholders and subsequent proof that objectives were achieved.