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Training Our Talent

Training our talent

Our workforce is our most important asset, and ensuring it is highly skilled and well-trained is an essential part of our human resources strategy.

We constantly invest in training to develop and enhance the knowledge and skills of our employees to ensure we can meet our business and operational goals, both now and in the future.

Our training approaches include skills shadowing and on-the-job development, technical training for specific job functions, formal training and development programs and on-going educational opportunities through scholarships to universities, including acclaimed international universities and technical schools.

We engage in detailed discussions around talent development and succession planning at all levels of our organization and provide constructive and regular feedback. We also maintain a comprehensive global database of employee skills and development plans to facilitate our annual talent reviews and succession planning across the company.

Our retention strategy, uses a range of tools varying by region and include:

  • Competitive base salaries - We aim to provide base salaries that are competitive relative to the local market peer group.
  • Incentive programs supporting our pay for performance philosophy.
  • Long-term incentive programs that support our ownership culture - We provide eligible employees with a stake in the future success of the company because our ownership culture is critical to who we are, how we work, and what we do at Barrick.
  • Engaging environment - We run several extracurricular activities to foster company pride, teamwork, and friendly competition between departments. These include football competitions, fun runs and cultural celebrations for Eid, Ramadan, Tabaski Day and Christmas.
  • Additional benefits - We offer a range of benefit programs across the company that are aligned with local market practice, such as a 24-month interest free loan to help our employees in Africa purchase motorbikes to commute to work or childcare support in Nevada.

Succession planning, planning for success

Our Board believes that talent management and succession planning are critical to Barrick’s continued success.

Our robust succession planning process has been designed to develop key strategic and tactical opportunities for every region and global function, to help them strengthen their human capital plans for senior leadership and critical roles across the organization.

We approach leadership and talent development with the same rigor and discipline that we apply to our business strategy. Our approach is anchored in developing and promoting the right internal talent and hiring the right external talent, with an emphasis on local recruitment, for career opportunities across our global organization.

We want all our employees to play an active role in the success of the business. To that end, we believe it is crucial we equip our people not only with the technical skills to fulfil their roles, but with the commercial knowledge and business acumen to run a large and complex organization.

We want our managers to understand how the decisions they make will affect the financial performance of their company.

To do this, we provide company-wide training programs to develop a foundation of technical and operational knowledge, as well as supervisory and management skills. We also have a best-in-class approach to developing financial acumen across the organization to help our people integrate financial and business needs into their everyday decision making. We also provide high potential employees the opportunity to enrol in management and executive development programs at leading universities in Africa, Europe, Canada and the United States, to build leadership skills and guide career advancement.