Robust opportunities to learn and grow can contribute to employee engagement and success. At Biogen, professional development can come through on-the-job learning and challenging new assignments, mentoring, in-person and online training, and more.
We offer more than 1,200 instructor-based courses through Biogen University. More than 300 of those are available virtually, and in 2022, we added more than 450 new on-demand eLearning courses, giving employees access to more than 20,000 modules in 11 languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, Spanish and Turkish.
To show the impact of our programs, we highlight two of our courses:
Women on the Rise
Leveraging the Reflected Best Self Exercise™ and strengths-based leadership, this program help participants understand the specifics about when they are at their best. It includes clarity of strengths, core values and public persona. Each cohort will discuss how those strengths show up and how to manage gender dynamics in leadership situations.
Objectives:
- Identify personal strengths and how to leverage them.
- Understand how to bring the best out in people.
- Build self-awareness and self-management skills.
- Connect your impact to your intention.
- Manage gender dynamics in leadership situations.
- Identify actions to support a culture of inclusion.
Approximately 5% of Biogen employees who identify as women have participated in Women on the Rise as of December 2022.
Impact of the Women on the Rise program:
- “This program helped acknowledge my thoughts and experiences with gender biases. I'm now equipped to articulate issues in this area.”
- “This training and experience will impact my growth and development for the rest of my life.”
- “Incredible program; I feel so lucky to have participated.”
New Manager Onboarding
This self-paced learning module is for new people managers – either new to Biogen in a manager role or newly promoted to managing people for the first time. This module provides an overview of Biogen's expectations for people managers and what it means to be an effective manager. It also offers guidance on where to find programs and resources to help them develop their manager capabilities, master the critical skills of people management and help set them up for success. This module is the first in a series that is designed to support new manager development.
Objective: New managers who complete this course will understand what it means to be an effective manager at Biogen and where to find critical guidance, programs and resources to successfully onboard.
Biogen continues to see the development of people managers as a vital way to retain top talent and develop manager skill sets to improve team effectiveness. Participation in this program provides people managers with the tools and resources necessary to practice effective managerial skills. Our annual engagement survey shows the effectiveness of these program with high favorability on manager effectiveness items. For example, 82% of respondents provided a favorable response on: “I would recommend my manager to others”.
Approximately 41% of people managers completed this self-paced learning module as of December 31, 2022.