Michael Fossat: After the Ladder: Schneider Electric Builds Career Architecture for the 21st Century

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, we republish Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s conversation with Michael Fossat, head of Schneider Electric’s Future Ready program and Director of HR at Schneider Electric France. With a 180-year history, Schneider is now focused on assisting and driving the energy transition to an electric and digital future. Yet this 150,000 strong company discovered that employees over the age of 50 (what Avivah calls Q3) weren’t as motivated and engaged as the rest. Schneider determined to fix that, especially given the talent wars they feel pressing on their business needs every day. The Future Ready Program is their response.Michael Fossat has worked at Schneider for much of his professional career. Passionate about sustainable business and people’s central role in achieving it, he joined Schneider Electric in France as an HR apprentice in an industrial department, participated in the creation of HR shared services for the entire group and worked in the R&D division, before moving to Barcelona to create the HR Metrics function globally. Returning to Paris he was successively HR VP for one of the business units, HR head of Central and Eastern Europe and HR leader for European plants and distribution centres. He is currently Head of HR for Schneider Electric France. Since 2021 he has also headed up the Future Ready Program, bringing to the role a wide knowledge of what motivates people across the group.RELEVANT LINKS* Schneider Electric website* Schneider Electric – Company Purpose* Schneider Electric Senior Talent Program white paper* https://www.kornferry.com/content/dam/kornferry/docs/pdfs/KF-Future-of-Work-Talent-Crunch-Report.pdf* https://www.aarpinternational.org/* Articles by Avivah on other Corporate Initiatives: Unilever and Aviv Get full access to 4-Quarter Lives | Elderberries at elderberries.substack.com/subscribe