PanEuropeanSeal YP in Human Resources & Business Administration

Check out the units which are participating in the Pan-European Seal Young Professionals Programme 2024/2025 and let us know your preference when applying: 

Community Relations (Munich) 
The Community Relations department is responsible, among other things, for key staff benefits such as financial support for crèches and schooling for EPO staff children and financial and administrative support for social and recreational activities for EPO staff and their family members. Managing these areas requires strong involvement in the governance of European Schools, acting as a liaison with international schools, managing the EPO crèche contracts as well as providing administrative support to Amicale (the EPO's social club). 

As a young professional, you will be involved in the project to modernise the framework to support the EPO's Amicale, which is part of the EPO's Strategic Plan 2028. You will gain an overview of the governance and functioning of this EPO social body with the ultimate aim of revising the regulations that define Amicale and its activities. You will help to organise working group meetings, analyse documentation and prepare reports, analyse similar bodies in other organisations and assist with the drafting of regulations. In addition, you will gain in-depth experience and understanding of how change projects are managed within the EPO. Finally, you may also contribute to the planning and organisation of Amicale events and other activities within the department. 

Compensation and Benefits (Munich) 
The EPO is responsible for defining the welfare support it offers its staff, pensioners and families, who altogether account for more than 23 000 people. Directorate Compensation and Benefits is responsible for designing policies related to the employee package and managing different social security benefits. To ensure that the package is competitive, it conducts benchmarks and internal and external studies. 

As a young professional, you will be involved in defining, assessing, and measuring the risks of the financial, operational, governance and compliance areas associated with the EPO's social security scheme, pension funds and remuneration systems. You will also be involved in analyses and simulations of the financial impact of compensation, benefits and social security schemes. Additionally, you will help monitor the development of total staff costs and long-term liabilities and assess their impact on the overall EPO financial situation. Moreover, you will provide support to senior management by proactively maintaining and defining a risk management strategy. 

Leadership Support Office (The Hague) 
In addition to supporting the VP and senior management of Directorate-General Patent Granting Process (DG 1) in their daily tasks, the Leadership Support Office (LSO) is tasked with providing reliable information and identifying the appropriate contacts across the EPO to facilitate and support efficient and sound managerial decisions. The LSO also organises meetings of the Executive Operations Committee and provides co-ordinated support for Management Advisory Committee and Administrative Council meetings. 

As a young professional, you will assist the team with document preparation, surveys, meeting agendas and minutes. You will be involved in monitoring the Young Professionals Programme within DG 1 and will liaise with the Chief Sustainability Officer unit on diversity and inclusion topics. 

Occupational Health Services and Well-being (Munich) 
Directorate People Engagement and Partnership supports the EPO and its management team in creating the conditions for everyone to genuinely engage and contribute positively to our overall mission. It supports individual staff members throughout their employee life cycle in an environment that fosters engagement and well-being. The main focus of the Well-being and Engagement team is to establish initiatives and projects that support the well-being and engagement of staff at the organisational level. We also maintain strong links with the Occupational Health Services department.  

As a young professional, you will help with internal surveys, engagement and well-being activities, and training programmes organised by the Well-being team as well as assist in different health- and safety-related topics and projects. Furthermore, you will be involved in the New Ways of Working pilot programme and any other upcoming projects. 

Pension and Remuneration Services (Munich) 
The EPO's Principal Directorate (PD) Welfare and Remuneration ensures that the EPO's social package is competitive and provides evidence-based measures to decision-makers to support the EPO's long-term financial sustainability. Directorate Pension and Remuneration Services centres its expertise on payroll services, pensions, taxation and the administration of expat and social services. 

As a young professional, you will learn how to apply our regulations, navigate related processes and deal with various internal stakeholders. In addition, you will help evaluate business processes and support process simplification and digitalisation projects. You will also assist in change management activities, communication, user testing and training documentation. Not only will you co-ordinate projects for the directorate regarding management reviews and litigation files (oversee deadlines, first assessment, collecting input and first drafting), but you will also gain a holistic understanding of the institutional and remuneration-related aspects of HR that contribute to the EPO's long-term financial and social sustainability. 

People Engagement and Partnership (Munich) 
Directorate People Engagement and Partnership supports the EPO and its management team in creating the conditions for everyone to genuinely engage and contribute positively to our overall mission. The directorate includes a number of teams, including HR Business Partners (engagement with management), HR Interlocutors, Occupational Health Services and Well-being (engagement with staff members). They all work hand-in-hand with other areas in Principal Directorate People and beyond to create a positive impact for the organisation. 

As a young professional, you will gain insight into customer handling, stakeholder engagement, HR project management, HR process optimisation and the art of cultivating meaningful relationships. Moreover, you will support projects on process simplification and digitalisation to help streamline HR processes and bring in best practices that drive organisational success. Additionally, you will support change management activities, communication, user testing and training, documentation, etc. You will also increase your understanding of HR business partner work as custodians of the EPO's strategy supporting management, where you will also be involved in project work.  

PGP Learning and Corporate Learning (Munich) 
The PGP (Patent Grant Process) Learning and Corporate Learning departments foster a growth mindset within the EPO culture in which learning is viewed as an essential asset required to achieve EPO strategic objectives. They are responsible for designing curricula for learning activities and achieve their objectives through a variety of online and on-site learning channels. Furthermore, they design and implement training and development programmes and cover all aspects pertaining to the organisation of learning activities, from funding to vendor management.  

As a young professional, you will assist course material designers and instructors to modernise content and provide training in an engaging way. Additionally, you will be involved in designing state-of-the-art interactive eLearning modules including AI and gamification for patent examiners and formalities officers. You will also learn to work with data analytics tools (Tableau) as well as curate document libraries and maintain an online learning platform. Furthermore, you will help implement engaging onboarding training for new staff, integrate peer-to-peer activities for the training programmes and foster digital fluency and AI use across the EPO. 

Quality Management System and Operational Quality Control (Munich) 
This department is responsible for the maintenance and continual improvement of the patent grant process's quality management system.  

Together with a great team, you will analyse and evaluate quality data and make proposals to top management to safeguard the quality of the EPO's products and services . You will be at the forefront of the continuous quality improvement process for the EPO's products and services. Furthermore, you will collect feedback from users, carry out analyses and develop new concepts to improve quality. Additionally, you will gain first-hand knowledge of what the EPO's users think of our quality and support the development of new quality improvement initiatives. 

Talent Acquisition (Munich) 
The Talent Acquisition department is responsible for developing the EPO's talent acquisition strategy to proactively ensure a diverse workforce and attract and select the best talents in Europe. Our main task is recruiting multilingual engineers and scientists from the European Patent Organisation's 39 member states to become European patent examiners. 

You will be involved in the daily operations of Talent Acquisition and the end-to-end recruitment process (from publishing vacancies to onboarding candidates). Your focus projects will be managing relationships with candidates using SuccessFactors and updating the careers web page. You will also be involved in HR's diversity and inclusion project. 

Talent Architecture (Munich) 
Talent Architecture is the home of skills management, performance management and rewards at the EPO. The core of our work consists of providing a strategic approach to managing our talents, mapping the skills of our staff to help them realise their full potential and promoting excellence in our service delivery. Furthermore, we focus on implementing a holistic performance and rewards management approach that boosts individual and organisational performance and promotes excellence, development and engagement.  

As a young professional, you will take part in completing an EPO-wide roll out of a skills framework and implementing the job architecture to support talent planning in the organisation. You will also help implement the annual performance cycle and rewarding exercises. As part of your work in the unit, you will be involved in operating SuccessFactors and dashboard tools as well as helping to prepare communication material for managers and staff.