Our People

At Chemring, our people are at the heart of everything we do and are key to our organisation’s growth strategy. We invest in our people at all levels, across every location and function. This focus ensures we have the right people enabled to perform and support our growth plans.

Our talent markets continue to be challenging, with the expectations of colleagues to have a best in class employee experience at Chemring. Although inflationary pressures are easing across our key markets, the cost of living challenge remains for our colleagues. We pay competitively and offer purposeful and impactful careers which support our customers, the end users of our products and services.

Our overall people approach is focused on five key areas:

Having the right people ready to perform
An understanding of our talent pipelines
Clear leadership and capability development programmes
A focus on the engagement and retention of our people
An underpinning of culture and employee experience at Chemring

Chemring Culture

We are proud of our values-based culture and the areas of Safety, Excellence and Innovation are the focus of everything we do. As a group of companies we leverage value through embracing what ties us together and respecting what differentiates us. Our principle of Global Voice, Local Accent defines the approach to investing in our people to bring the best of our corporate programmes whilst ensuring our business units bring their local unique customs and practices to engage and empower the workforce.

Our Population

Our business units each have an individual focus on the skills and talent they need, as well as a clear understanding of their local talent markets, and, with that, a focus on building a truly engaged workforce. Chemring strives for a more agile, engaged and higher-performing workforce.

We benchmark our external local talent markets and work continuously to seek ways to attract, engage and retain our workforce.

As we continue to grow as an organisation, we also continue to focus on creating a best in class employee experience through our people strategy. 2024 has seen a number of new “digital first” HR tools launched across the Group to modernise and improve the efficiency of our approach, from employee-centric HR information systems to localised employee listening tools getting to the heart of what’s important to our colleagues. We also continue to look at ways to leverage the ever evolving Microsoft 365 platform as a way to improve how people collaborate and get work done for our “online” colleagues.

Our talent pipelines

To identify the best talent for our workforce, we tap into various internal and external talent pipelines. We recruit from a wide array of external channels, targeting direct hires for critical areas in the Group, as well as aspiring professionals early in their career journey. Moreover, we adopt new strategies to develop talent streams in unconventional areas, like through the Roke Academy, which offers individuals from a variety of professional backgrounds the opportunity to learn skills that are vital for our future needs.

We evolved our early careers UK programme in 2024 to create two streams focusing more explicitly on our two sectors. This change has allowed each programme to focus on its unique sector-specific story and develop skillsets in line with its organisational plans.

Our focus on talent also extends to supporting the pipelines of talent moving through our organisation. Our talent assessment activities are centred around the need to plan and develop to solve today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities. We actively seek ways to create opportunities for our talent to gain those experiences before they are needed.

Our talent programme, Aspire@Chemring, launched in May 2022 and its second cohort graduated in August this year. Aspire@Chemring is designed to connect a global cohort of future senior leaders and provide experiences designed to open their perspectives to future roles as Leaders of People or Leaders of Subject Matter Expertise (“SME”).

We aim to collaborate with industry peers and governmental bodies to enhance the skills and movement of professionals into our organisation. As an active member of the Ministry of Defence led Defence Suppliers Forum, we are helping to shape solutions to the sector-wide challenge of bringing STEM talent into the sector, one that we are all facing.

In the UK, we’ve worked with the Institute of Engineering and Technology (“IET”) for the past five years, providing scholarships to students from underprivileged backgrounds, enabling educational opportunities otherwise inaccessible. This variety in background introduces unique viewpoints within Chemring, which is evident when our IET scholarship recipients engage in summer internships and from those who have been successful in securing full-time roles with Chemring at graduation.

Leadership and capability development

Our focus on internal talent is as important as identifying and securing external talent. We offer development opportunities for all colleagues, not only to ensure we have the right skills, in the right place, at the right time, but to engage our workforce with meaningful and impactful careers.

We see development as a strategic enabler for meeting our business and customer commitments, and it continues to serve our growth plans by ensuring we can develop our internal talent as well as seeking external talent. We use Performance Conversations as a tool to align personal career aspirations to business objectives and as a way to understand and engage with our colleagues and their individual aspirations.

We continue to run our established Group development programmes, which include our two-year early careers programme, our supervisor focused Leading Our People programme, and our talent development programme, Aspire@Chemring. Aspire@Chemring graduated its second cohort of 52 global talent in 2024, creating new networks and inspiring our future senior leaders.

In the UK, we continue to utilise the Apprenticeship Levy to maximise apprentice development opportunities at the entry, middle and senior levels, covering specialist skillsets and functional competency.

Engagement and retention

Our workforce is the driver of our success, and we aim to put the employee experience at the forefront of our decision making. Our external talent markets remain extremely competitive and therefore the engagement and retention of our workforce is a people imperative.

Listening to all colleagues is essential to understand what’s important to our workforce, and since this will differ across our global organisation, in 2024, we moved to using local listening tools and technologies to ensure they gathered the specific “Local Accent”. This enables the tools used locally to be tailored to the local cultures, contexts, environments and working practices, and ensures that the action taken is as effective and impactful to that employee group. We therefore no longer have a single consolidated employee positivity metric for the Group, instead prioritising each business unit’s individual positivity scores with the majority of positivity results in the 73-75% range, reflecting the local relevance of opportunities each business has to continuously improve.

Furthermore there are many ways in which our colleagues are engaged with individually, from one-to-one performance conversations to works councils and listening sessions. In many of our businesses, leadership make themselves available through all-hands town hall meetings in which any colleague can raise questions.

Laurie Bowen, non-executive director and Remuneration Committee Chair, is tasked with employee engagement for the Board. For the fourth consecutive year, Laurie has connected with colleagues across the Company, at a variety of levels and in differing roles, focusing on business units experiencing change and transformation. Visiting Roke, Chemring Energetic Devices in Chicago, Chemring Countermeasures in PA and Chemring Countermeasures in Salisbury, she explored how their business’ respective organisational change was going and was encouraged to hear of how the ambitious vision for our companies is being translated into our colleagues’ day-to-day experiences.

Areas of feedback in 2024 included the acknowledgement of local leadership teams’ efforts to involve and engage the workforce in the changes in the businesses, whilst highlighting the challenges of communications keeping up with the rapid pace of change. Safety remains a top priority in the eyes of our colleagues who speak up when they identify improvement opportunities, which has extended beyond physical safety into the wellbeing agenda in 2024. Laurie also heard of the maturing of our standards and processes in line with our business growth, to ensure our operational efficiency serves our business targets and ambitions. The groups identified specific opportunities to improve, which were openly and constructively communicated, and summarised to the leadership teams for action as part of their local employee engagement action planning process.

Thanks to this feedback, our local leadership teams at these locations can ensure that employee feedback informs and supports their growth agendas. Employee feedback remains a key channel for insights into how we can shape Chemring’s employee engagement priorities both at a local level and Group level.

This approach is how we focus on developing our culture so that it serves our colleagues and our customers. We work to the principle of embracing what ties us together and respecting what differentiates us. Our values driven culture is based on our values of Safety, Excellence and Innovation and is the foundation all our businesses work to.

Our communities

Chemring takes its commitment to enhancing social value seriously, both at the local and national level in the regions we operate within.

With businesses located across varying geographies, the “Local Accent” element which balances our “Global Voice” is of great importance to us. No more so than in how our businesses represent and integrate into the local communities of which we form a part. All of our workforces have strong local ties to the community, and we see numerous charity and volunteering efforts from our workforce which serve those communities.

The education sector is another area of focus with the opportunity to provide STEM sponsorship and support in local schools and colleges. Our IET bursary sponsorship in the UK further targets socially and economically deprived students to try and create a strong STEM pipeline.

Investing in this community today helps us to build a broad pool of talent to join the engineering and defence sectors in years to come.

In addition, we partner with charities that directly support those who are end users of our products and services. We honour the service that they have given through the support of events such as “Ride with a Veteran” and through our support of veteran networks like the US Marine Corps charity Marine Toys for Tots Foundation.