Learning and Leadership Development

Our people are our most important competitive advantage.

When we provide opportunities for our people to develop their capabilities and advance their careers, we increase employee engagement and fulfillment with their work.  Furthermore, our ability to increase our global footprint, grow organically, and create breakthrough innovations is built on the diverse knowledge, skills, and commitment of our people living The PPG Way.

The PPG Way to Lead

Our training and development programs aim to instill The PPG Way throughout our workforce (learn more about The PPG Way here). We introduced The PPG Way to Lead in 2022, which establishes a consistent understanding of leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities that applies to every PPG employee. We introduced this framework to provide additional clarity and consistent guidance for what great leadership looks like at PPG. The PPG Way to Lead defines six core competencies for all employees and three additional competencies for people leaders. Developing these competencies result in increased retention, stronger engagement, and better business performance and helps our employees grow their careers.

As part of the launch, we made resources available to all employees so they could understand how The PPG Way to Lead applies to their role and professional development at each level of the company, including:

• Releasing a series of micro-learning modules to explain each competency in The PPG Way to Lead
• Facilitating sessions with managers and senior leadership to explain how they bring The PPG Way to Lead to life in their role
• Mapping existing training programs in the Learning Management System (LMS) to the nine competencies of The PPG Way to Lead
• Creating the Global Learning Curriculum, an easy-to-access and -navigate resource that houses all learning and development programs offered to our people

We also laid the groundwork for the core competencies defined in The PPG Way to Lead to be fully integrated into our annual goal setting. This helps ensure that employee advancement and career development aligns with the focus areas of The PPG Way to Lead, and keeps our people engaged.

We focus on offering our people a mix of new experiences, open platform mentoring & structured coaching. We have been upgrading systems to new ways of learning by adopting just-in-time materials & learning on-the-go tools. A few of our learning and leadership development highlights in 2022 include:

• Inclusion 2.0: We launched our hybrid inclusion workshop, Inclusion 2.0. The program combines a self-paced virtual course with live discussions sessions via Microsoft Teams that provide an open and safe environment for participants to understand each other’s lived experiences. Inclusion 2.0 is open to all PPG employees, and helps build awareness of our conscious and unconscious biases.
• Leader as a Coach: We launched a program entitled Leader as a Coach to develop coaching capabilities in our senior people leaders. The three-month program equips our managers with techniques that help drive employee performance and engagement with a collaborative, coaching leadership style. Participants in the program learn how to develop trust with their teams, improve their coaching skills, increase their confidence as leaders, and ultimately drive better business performance.
• LinkedIn Learning and Udemy Learning: We integrated courses offered through LinkedIn Learning and Udemy Business into the LMS. This enables employees to search for development topics through the LMS and automatically have external digital resources populated from vetted external vendors.
• Engagement Training: We developed three engagement trainings aimed at increasing people engagement scores. These included an all-employee training on accountability, and a manager’s primer and toolkit for engagement.
• Sustainability Learning: We released three Sustainability 101 video modules, which are available to all employees through the LMS, to help them better understand core sustainability, decarbonization and climate change concepts. The videos were viewed more than 2,000 times. In early 2023, we also introduced 36 learning audiocasts that cover topics ranging from mass balance to biodiversity.

Our approach to learning and leadership development

Learning and skill development

We continuously invest in learning and skill development initiatives to ensure our employees are properly trained, productive and engaged at every stage of their careers. Our global learning strategy, built on The PPG Way and The PPG Way to Lead, is focused on delivering training to the right people, at the right place and at the right time. We leverage our Performance Management process to ensure our employees get to discuss with their managers and document their growth goals every year. This allows them to explore new projects, leverage existing programs, tools and resources to develop individual needs and interests, and in turn develop organization-wide capabilities.

Our ongoing offerings include a range of virtual facilitator-led workshops, self-paced external learning platforms and Evolve, our LMS available through Workday.

When employees complete a course across these platforms, we ask them to respond to a brief survey on their experience. We calculate net promoter scores (NPS) based on these survey results and review any programs that fall short of our expectations. We also hold focus groups with program participants to understand the strengths and weaknesses of our programs. These feedback mechanisms give our dedicated training team an indication of how we can improve our suite of training modules over time.

Some highlights of our ongoing internal training programs include:

• DE&I capability building: As part of our efforts to drive diversity, equity and inclusion throughout PPG, we offer training through our LMS as well as facilitated, interactive workshops on unconscious bias to our people managers and employees. Our virtual prerequisite is offered in 10 languages and in-person sessions are offered in 11 languages to ensure that they are widely accessible to our staff. The training focuses on understanding the harmful prejudices that stem from the tendency to organize social worlds by categorizing groups and people.
• Developing sales capabilities: We offer a suite of virtual training modules and virtual instructor-led sessions based on our best-in-class sales training programs. Anyone in our sales organization can take Selling Skills to learn how to develop rapport with clients, close sales and retain customers. Managers are encouraged to take courses on Professional Sales Coaching, which helps them develop their teams. This year, to drive One PPG sales excellence and profitable growth, we implemented The Selling Machine People Cog. This allowed us to provide our sales organization with a full lifecycle development process to effectively hire, develop and reward all sales employees against a consistent framework.
• Supporting professional development: We offer all of our employees access to virtual Career Growth Workshops to support their professional development. The workshops guide employees through the process of creating a career development plan and preparing for effective conversations with management about their professional growth. We also provide training to our people managers to ensure they understand how to support their teams, including best practices for empowering their staff and giving useful feedback.

We supplement our internally managed training by providing access to external learning platforms. Examples of the resources available to our employees include:

• LinkedIn Learning: LinkedIn Learning is one of the world’s largest online learning platforms featuring topic-specific content created by leading experts. Courses offered cover many aspects of professional and personal development, ranging from time management and leadership skills to training on specific software, such as Microsoft Excel.
• Rosetta Stone: Rosetta Stone is a series of best-in-class language programs that we use to offer PPG employees eLearning and live tutorials in 24 languages. Many of our employees in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East use Rosetta Stone to take English language classes, which helps foster global collaboration across PPG.
• Udemy Learning: Udemy offers courses that cover a range of topics including development, IT, design, leadership, sustainability and marketing. The platform includes personalized learning and actionable insights to help participants stay engaged and reach their educational goals.

Leadership development

When filling leadership positions, we balance internal promotions and external hiring to leverage the skills already present across the enterprise while bringing new talent and diverse ideas into the company. We provide development opportunities across PPG so our people can grow into effective leaders and advance in their careers.

Our approach to leadership development focuses on experience, exposure and education. We offer a wide array of development opportunities that include performance and learning plans, extensive on-the-job training, ongoing formal and informal feedback, structured development programs, peer learning opportunities, coaching and mentoring.

Highlights of our structured leadership development programs include:

• Essentials of Leadership: Our frontline leadership program, Essentials of Leadership (EOL), focuses on developing leaders and managers across the organization. EOL provides new leaders with the right mindset, skills, and tools to lead more effectively, which ultimately builds engagement from participants and their teams. The program is delivered in six modules by virtual or in-person sessions. EOL's structured curriculum ensures global alignment and consistent guidance for developing managers and supervisors.
• Emerge: The Emerge Leadership Program helps guide our future executives through an 11-12 month program. Participants are nominated for participation based on exemplary performance in a people leadership role and having potential to grow into a larger scale role. The program is a series of four facilitated sessions focused on peer coaching, mentorship from PPG's leadership team and networking skills. Participants are given opportunities to practically apply their insights to real business challenges and learn from their peers.
• Leader as a Coach: The Leader as a Coach program aims to develop coaching capabilities in our senior people leaders. Over three months, participants in the program learn how to develop trust with their teams, improve their coaching skills, increase their confidence as leaders and ultimately drive better business performance.
• Online mentoring and coaching: Any employee at PPG can access our online One PPG Mentoring program. The program aims to support insightful, respectful connections across PPG. Prospective mentors take a mandatory series of e-learning courses that determine if they are qualified to act as a mentor, and then set up a profile with their qualifications. Employees interested in signing up as mentees can search through these profiles to select the right mentor to support their personal development.