In 2011, we decided to develop career path overviews for our employees that show possible career tracks available across ASML. These overviews describe the skills employees need to be successful in their current job, and the skills and competencies they would have to develop to be able to move to a higher level, or to a job in a different department.

Career path overviews can be accessed via our online Career Tracker tool and were made available for 95% of our staff in 2011. We plan to make overviews for the rest in 2012. The introduction of career path overviews coincided with taking steps to simplify our career and salary structure. We reduced the number of positions to 90 from about 800.

The overviews will help employees and their managers to make a personal development action plan. This could include getting training in a new area of technology or in customer service, support from a coach or mentor, or on-the-job training in new fields. Our online Career Tracker tool lets employees browse through available training programs to support their development.

We developed a new in-house management training program, the Leadership Capability Program, aimed at our top 700 managers, including the Board of Management. The program includes modules on personal development, structuring tasks and setting priorities, and communicating goals and intentions.

More than 200 senior managers completed the Leadership Capability Program in 2011. The program consists of eight training days divided into three modules for each manager.

Together with a global preferred supplier we designed a generic curriculum, containing a set of 18 global programs to help staff improve their ‘soft skills’ in the areas of communication, personal effectiveness, presentation skills, performance management, leadership, change management and project leadership. These non-technical training programs are offered as open enrollment courses for the target group of employees up to middle management, including flex employees.

In 2011, we trained more than 3,000 employees worldwide through our generic curriculum programs.

In 2012, we aim to train at least 3,000 employees worldwide through the generic curriculum programs

In 2011, we developed and introduced new ‘dashboards’ that provide an overview of the following important HR issues across the company:

• head count

• recruitment

• attrition (a measure of people leaving)

• promotions

• rotations

• absenteeism

• overtime

• expats (long-term international assignments)

With these dashboards, we can now get a much clearer picture of how the company is performing in these different areas. We can do external benchmarking – for example, comparing our attrition rate with the industry average. And from an internal point of view, we can use the data to find out which initiatives are working particularly well in some areas, and which are not. Finally, dashboards are a starting point for discussion on actions that may be required to make improvements in specific areas.

Attrition amounted to 4.2% of our employees working on a fixed contract in 2011 (2010: 5.6%). Also see the table Sustainability Culture KPIs and Performance in the section 'How we manage sustainability' in this chapter.