The French railway group boasts an HR department with over 7,000 employees, who represent almost 2.7% of its workforce.

In view of the number of annual hires (4,400 in 2018¹), the fact that there are over 150 different occupations and, most importantly, the sweeping changes faced by the company, support and training within the department is a major issue.

The HR academy was designed to unify the department and is geared towards building a common culture and helping the stakeholders become more professional. It offers customised training courses for the HR department’s different positions, irrespective of where they are located in the group’s various entities.

A two-pronged “Excellence Responsable RH” course has been introduced to enable HR to hone its position and learn occupation-related technical skills so that it can forge partnerships with managers and help with the overall development approach by being truly proactive.    

The academy is staffed by fifteen full-time trainers who are constantly putting forward innovative measures such as pairing off with the HR departments of other major businesses and SMEs to compare in-house practices with those of other organisations.

The buzzwords for this future-facing academy are cohesion and openness to the exterior.


¹ Every year, the SNCF group receives and processes 250,000 applications.