Competition for the best minds is in full swing. For this reason, many employers are intensively dealing with the question of how to attract and retain skilled employees for their own company. Many small and medium-sized companies are in no way inferior to large corporations in creating attractive conditions for their employees.

Zukunftgeber is an award that particularly attractive employers in the region can receive if they participate in the AGV's certification process.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST was audited in a total of ten categories and faced the central questions of flexibility, individual offers and incentives. Overall, top marks were achieved in all nine categories: nutrition and health, attractive earning opportunities, family-friendliness, personnel development and qualification, digitalization, innovation, communication and transparency, mobility and connectivity, scope for development and convenience, and sense of responsibility.

AGV Managing Director Cordula Miosga said: "We can only congratulate the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST on this good result. Of course, there are still things that can be improved, which is also the purpose of this initiative.”

Prof. Dr. Christoph Herrmann, Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST, emphasizes that value-oriented employee management and the creation of a modern, digitalized organization in which employees are encouraged and challenged are very important to him and he is therefore particularly pleased about the award. The employer seal is now an additional anchor point with which the company can present itself. Annelie Lambert, administrative manager of the Fraunhofer IST, also explains: "We are very pleased that we score points with our attractive working conditions and incentives and that we can also take away valuable impulses for our further commitment.“

The Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST has now joined the ranks of certified companies on the regional portal  die-region.de and Zukunftgeber.de. There you will find a digital overview of the particularly attractive Zukunftgeber in the region. "We admire how outstandingly the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST is positioned in the areas of family-friendliness, personnel development and qualification, and digitalization. Whether mobile working, parent-child offices, flexible working hours or various personnel development offers, the employer fulfills its mission of training specialists and managers in the high-tech sector with diverse, modern and employee-friendly offers. Special employee achievements are also rewarded with excellence bonuses, performance bonuses and a collective profit-sharing scheme based on the fiscal year. We also paid particular attention to the sense of corporate responsibility which is very pronounced at the Fraunhofer IST. As part of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and thus the world's leading organization for application-oriented research, the Fraunhofer Future Foundation, for example, is also part of the program. Its aim is to create products, services and business processes with which people and companies can act in a more environmentally and socially compatible manner," Cordula Miosga concludes.