ESG
Topics A-Z
ESG Topics A-Z
Employee learning and development
To PepsiCo:
Developing a highly talented workforce is essential for our ongoing success. We cultivate employees' skills and experiences to improve retention, increase productivity and effectiveness and drive our long-term success.
To the World:
Throughout their careers, workers benefit from continued learning and the acquisition of new skills and competencies. These can be conveyed through a wide variety of formats and experiences and can contribute to rewarding careers, higher standards of living and increased job satisfaction.
Approach
As part of our pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) strategy, we’re working to provide meaningful jobs and growth opportunities for our associates. We empower them to make a positive impact at work, at home and in their local communities. We further their careers through increased access to skill development, higher education, broadening experiences and new job roles that offer growth opportunities to everyone at every stage.
Skill Development
PepsiCo’s Global Learning Center of Expertise (COE) enables a culture of continuous learning and development. In consultation with PepsiCo leaders, the COE sets priorities for global classroom and online curriculum needs. Our curriculum is organized by topic across three categories:
- Leadership and management
- Future-ready workforce
- Functional skills
Employees can mix-and-match online and face-to-face content from these categories to suit their learning styles and objectives. Global leadership programs are rich, hands-on experiences in which leaders solve real business problems alongside global peers. Our learners emerge empowered to work in new ways, engaged in our global strategy and better connected to other leaders across the business. Our leaders are actively engaged in the teaching process, supporting learning in both formal and informal settings.
The future-ready workforce portfolio includes resources for everyone at PepsiCo to build skills and literacy in digital topics like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and more. Our functional skills portfolio includes self-paced and instructor led learning on state-of-the-art functional capabilities across sales, supply chain, marketing, finance, HR, R&D and more.
Our programs balance depth of learning with the time commitment of each program to help employees fit education into their busy lives. For example, seeking an outside thought-leader perspective might be the best way to provide insight into a company strategy challenge, while a simple document might provide the necessary answer to a process question. For this reason, we do not set targets for the number of hours employees spend in trainings a year; more significant is the quality of the programs and their ability to glean important new knowledge and skills.
In 2022, PepsiCo expanded the reach of its online learner experience platform, PEP U Degreed, which leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to suggest personalized learning resources across the three portfolios — leadership and management, future-ready workforce and functional skills — based on a learner’s skill level, interests, colleague connections and learning habits. With PEP U Degreed, we are able to offer creative learning solutions that go beyond the typical eLearning and instructor-led training options by providing access to wider resources such as industry articles, TED talks, podcasts and more.
Higher Education
Beyond the walls of PepsiCo business-related training, we also offer U.S.-based employees a debt-free education program: myeducation. Through myeducation, launched in March 2022, employees have access to more than 100 flexible upskilling programs from highly reputable schools and universities. PepsiCo covers 100% of tuition costs, books and fees for programs within the debt-free catalog, in addition to PepsiCo’s established tuition reimbursement program.
Education paths offered within the myeducation catalog include:
- Foundational learning opportunities, such as high school completion, college prep courses and English language learning classes;
- Undergraduate degrees in high-growth areas like business, operations and supply chain, data analytics, technology and more;
- Trade upskilling programs to gain new skills, such as obtaining a Commercial Driver's License (CDL) for in-demand roles; and
- Boot camps and certificates in business-aligned areas that can be completed with a smaller time investment.
Under the traditional tuition reimbursement program, U.S. employees may receive up to $5,250 in yearly funding for certain programs and undergraduate degrees not included in the debt-free catalog. Up to $8,000 in tuition assistance for graduate degrees is available per year, as well.
Broadening Experiences
In 2022, we launched mydevelopment, an internal talent marketplace allowing employees to access internal jobs and stretch assignments based on their skills, capabilities and areas of development. mydevelopment uses AI to make personalized opportunity suggestions based on their individual, self-input profile. Anyone can post a project or apply to work on a project, opening up broadening experiences across functions and geographies at scale.
Progress
In 2022, we launched two new learning platforms: myeducation and mydevelopment, which promote to upskilling and re-skilling and additional insight into internal jobs and stretch assignments. We also expanded the reach of our online learner experience platform, PEP U Degreed.
Progress
As noted above, in 2022 we- added new self-paced educational resources to PEP U Degreed;
- launched myeducation for U.S.-based associates; and
- launched mydevelopment to help employees expand their working horizons.
Challenges
Employees can have difficulty finding time to fit learning within their day-to-day jobs. We continue to develop shorter, "bite-size" learning resources for easier consumption in the flow of work.
What's next?
Creating development interventions that focus on individual skills — and connecting those with other HR tools — will enable PepsiCo employees to find countless opportunities for growth. Those future opportunities may include projects, mentorship relationships or new full-time roles.
We are working to ensure employees see links across our talent initiatives and platforms. For example, graduates of myeducation are encouraged to seek opportunities to apply their new skills via mydevelopment.
As we strive to build a Positive Value Chain, we’re committed to showing all parts of our organization that career growth and learning and development are important.