Human Resources and Competence Management in Public Transport

Ozlem TATAR, Senior Manager, Academy, UITP

This session explores the critical role of HR in one of the largest employment sectors. It addresses unique opportunities and challenges specific to public transport, emphasising the importance of diversity, inclusion, recruitment and retention strategies. The session also highlights approaches to enhance employee engagement and well-being, ensuring a motivated and resilient workforce.

• Role of Human Resources Management
• Public Transport a Major Employer
• Opportunities and challenges specific to public transportation
• Diversity and inclusion
• Recruitment and Retention
• Employee Engagement and Well-being

Strategic management is a crucial approach, emphasising the alignment of mission, vision and core values with organisational goals and objectives. It explores how strategy is cascaded from corporate level to individual performance, highlighting leadership strategies and execution methods to drive success through people-focused management.

• Introduction to strategic management and principles
• Mission, Vision and core values
• Goals and objectives
• Cascading strategies from corporate to individuals
• Leadership strategy and executions
• VUCA world – the new «normal» business environment
• How to build a strategy and translate it into operational terms

A competence management framework for public transport plays a pivotal role by identifying the key skills required for critical roles. It covers mapping current skill sets against organisational needs, developing people strategies and using competence matrices to address skill gaps. In addition, it emphasises understanding staff personalities to create a better work environment and improve team dynamics.

• Identifying key skills for public transport: key roles for public transport
• Mapping current skill sets with requirements with people development strategy
• Competence matrix and gaps
• Identifying staff personality for better working environment

Effective career planning and coaching strategies align organisational growth with personal development goals. These strategies focus on creating structured career development plans that support employee progression, enhance skills and drive long-term success within public transport organisations.

• Career planning and coaching
• Organisational growth with personal developments
• Creating career development plans

This session focuses on developing and organising effective training programmes to upskill the public transport workforce, starting with training needs analysis and programme design.

It highlights the importance of balancing technical and soft-skill development, using personal development plans (PDPs) for continuous growth and fostering a culture of lifelong learning to support long-term career and corporate development. In addition, it covers how to measure training effectiveness to ensure impactful outcomes

• Training need analysis and designing training programs for the transportation workforce
• Balancing technical and soft skill development
• Personal development plans (PDPs) as a tool for continuous growth
• Continuous learning for long-term career growth and corporate developments
• Measuring training effectiveness

Aligning personal objectives with company strategy drives organisational success. Effective training management focuses on creating clear, measurable objectives and key results (OKRs), and explores performance appraisal methods and feedback processes to monitor progress and enhance employee performance.

• Aligning personal objectives with company strategy
• Creating clear, measurable objectives and key results
• Performance appraisals and feedback

• Public transport company strategies
• Relation with human resources management
• Personal objectives and evaluation and monitoring
• Corporate and Individual KPIs
• Inclusion of Women Drivers to Executive Management

Successful companies motivate staff and enhance engagement through performance-based bonuses and by involving employees in decision-making processes. They focus on aligning incentives with company goals, establishing fair and transparent reward systems and strengthening motivation through recognition programmes and financial and non-financial rewards.

In addition, they highlight the importance of suggestion systems, integrating employee input into decision-making and fostering a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement and shared responsibility for organisational success.

• Implementing bonus and malus systems for performance
• Aligning incentives with company goals
• Implementing fair and transparent reward systems
• Motivating staff through recognition, financial and non-financial rewards

• Implementing and effective management of suggestions systems
• Integrating suggestion system into decision making process

• Certificates
• Evaluation