KPN wins prize for Best Trainee Program Benelux

The main title we took home with us is the overall prize for Best Traineeship. We also went home with the prize for Best Training & Development in the Young Talent Program, and we won the prize for Best Traineeship Program Manager.

Best Traineeship Benelux is an annual competition in which companies that offer traineeships compete with one another. We made the pitch for our program last Friday. We showed what the value of the program is for KPN from a variety of perspectives. Other organizations in the race for the title were the Municipality of Amsterdam, KLM, MainFreight (a logistics company) and Disgover (a traineeship agency).

Central themes

The road leading to choosing the winners was a long one. In December, 40 Young Talents at KPN completed a questionnaire comprising ten themes that are essential for the trainee program. The purpose of this was to gauge the extent to which these themes are important to them and the extent to which they feel that the themes have been implemented in our program.

On the basis of the results the eight companies with the highest scores were invited to compete in the semi-final, during which an expert jury interviews a Young Talent and the program manager. Among the reasons why we won the overall prize are the structure of our program and the scope trainees get to develop their own projects.

Courage is rewarded

The jury praised the fact that KPN's traineeship pays a lot of attention to what the trainees want to learn: “They are encouraged to step out of their comfort zone and into a zone where courage is rewarded and there is scope for failure. The traineeship focuses on development and on how you reach your goals. KPN was able to illustrate the traineeship from various perspectives, also showing how the traineeship is sustained within the organization.”