Claudia Wawerzinek, company trainer for prospective business and logistics specialists at Hermes Fulfilment in Haldensleben, is delighted to be welcoming more trainees this year than in the past: "The positive response shows that Hermes Fulfilment enjoys a very good reputation among school students as a training company. With our training program, we want to lay the foundation for a successful career in a future-oriented industry."
Since 1994, the site has been the logistical hub for the Otto Group's trading companies. With its two facilities on Hamburger Straße and in the neighboring Südhafen, the Haldensleben distribution center specializes in handling small-volume assortments. These primarily include clothing and shoes. Using state-of-the-art technology, robotics, and AI, Hermes Fulfilment takes care of warehousing, packs parcels and bags with items ordered online, handles shipping to more than 20 European countries, and restocks items that are returned because they are not wanted.
Hermes Fulfilment in Haldensleben employs around 4,000 people. This makes the returns and logistics service provider the largest employer in the city and one of the ten largest employers in Saxony-Anhalt. A total of 344 young people have been trained in various professions since 1996, 191 of them since 2017 alone. However, the increasing shortage of skilled workers has not spared the Hermes Fulfilment shipping center. "That's why it's all the more important to train people for our own needs and to retain the qualified specialists of tomorrow for the company today," emphasizes Claudia Wawerzinek.
She regularly attends training fairs in the region to provide information about the various apprenticeships and career prospects at the Haldensleben shipping center, gives presentations at schools, works with educational institutions, and is in close contact with the Employment Agency and the Magdeburg Chamber of Industry and Commerce. The "HF macht Schule" (HF goes to school) project has proven particularly successful in recruiting trainees. Once a year, all ninth-grade students in Haldensleben are invited to the distribution center. There, they talk to trainees, get to know the different areas during a tour, take a look at the high-bay warehouse, for example, and help out in the automated returns warehouse, in shipping, or in goods dispatch. "This project helps us recruit most of our trainees," says Claudia Wawerzinek.
The fact that training at Hermes Fulfilment is highly valued is also evident in the company's own training workshop. There, prospective electronics technicians and industrial mechanics familiarize themselves with technical skills such as turning, drilling, milling, and grinding as part of a twelve-month basic training program before being assigned to various areas of the shipping center. In addition, there are electronic tasks such as building control systems, testing motors, and measuring plant components. Operations technicians at the site keep the conveyor technology, which is up to 30 kilometers long, running smoothly. "The fact that we, as a logistics service provider, maintain our own training workshop is a unique selling point," emphasizes Claudia Wawerzinek. Of the approximately 100 employees in building services and operations engineering, a good fifth were trained in-house. In general, the chances of being hired are high: "After successfully completing their training, our trainees can choose their area of work. And as a rule, they are also hired there," reports Claudia Wawerzinek.