Our people

People strategy

Our people strategy focuses on creating an exceptional people experience throughout the entire talent cycle, particularly during key moments for candidates, employees and leaders. The people strategy aims to build awareness and engagement around trusted leadership, provide a consistently high service experience and ensure that the organisation is equipped with the right mix of skills and capabilities for both current and future needs. This approach is designed to deliver a distinctive client experience and drive the growth agenda by building a diverse and inclusive workforce.

Martina Bender
Chief People Officer
PwC Switzerland

Transparency Report 2024

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The PwC Professional

The PwC Professional is the set of behaviours we expect of all our people, at all levels, to demonstrate with each other and with our clients and other stakeholders. When we focus on the behaviours that guide our interactions, we create opportunities to build trust and empower our teams to deliver distinctive outcomes. This is how we build trust in society and solve important problems.

Inclusion and diversity

At PwC, we are an organisation that fosters a culture of belonging and equity where our diverse workforce can thrive and feel like they belong. We do this by delivering on our Inclusion First strategy, which is centred on action, accountability and advocacy, in each of our member firms, across the PwC Network.

We embrace and encourage differences and help our people actively develop the skills to work and lead inclusively with our focus on gender equity, disability inclusion, LGBT+ inclusion and social inclusion. Underpinning this is ensuring our systems and behaviours are inclusive.

Talent Acquisition

PricewaterhouseCoopers AG aims to recruit, train, develop and retain the best and the brightest staff who share in the firm’s strong sense of responsibility for delivering high-quality services. Our hiring standards include a structured interview process with behaviour-based questions built from the PwC Professional framework, an assessment of academic records and background checks. Across the firm in FY24, PricewaterhouseCoopers AG recruited 774 new people, including 464 university graduates, interns and apprentices.

Team selection, experience and supervision

Our audit engagements are staffed based on expertise, capabilities and years of experience. Engagement leaders determine the extent of direction, supervision and review of junior staff. In addition, we are taking the personal preferences of our employees into consideration, if possible, when staffing for an engagement to support individual development and increase retention.

Feedback and continuous development

Our team members obtain feedback on their overall performance, including factors related to audit quality, such as technical knowledge, auditing skills and professional scepticism. Audit quality is an important factor in performance evaluation and career progression decisions for both our partners and staff. Formal feedback on performance and progression is collected via Workday. We use Workday to give and receive upward, peer and downward feedback. Ongoing feedback conversations help our people to grow and learn faster, adapt to new and complex environments and bring the best to our clients and firm.

Career progession

PricewaterhouseCoopers AG uses the PwC Professional, our global career progression framework, which sets out clear expectations at all staff levels across five key dimensions. The framework underpins all elements of career development and helps our people develop into well-rounded professionals and leaders with the capabilities and confidence to produce high-quality work, deliver an efficient and effective experience for our clients, execute our strategy and support our brand. Our annual performance cycle is supported by continuous feedback conversations and regular check-ins with the individual’s team leader to discuss their development, progression and performance.

Retention

Turnover in the public accounting profession is often high because as accounting standards and regulations change, accountants are in demand and the development experience we provide makes our staff highly sought after in the external market. Our voluntary turnover rate fluctuates based on many factors, including the overall market demand for talent. Ensuring a great people experience is a top priority of PricewaterhouseCoopers AG and embedded accordingly in our KPI framework. Feedback from our people, be it from new joiners, as part of our Global People Survey or from leavers, is systematically collected and analysed, and areas for improvement identified.

Global People Survey

Each PwC firm participates in an annual Global People Survey, administered across the network to all our partners and staff. PricewaterhouseCoopers AG is responsible for analysing and communicating results locally, along with clearly defined actions to address feedback. PricewaterhouseCoopers AG generally has a high participation rate in the Global People Survey. In 2024, 90% of our partners and staff provided their feedback, resulting in an overall People Engagement Index of 78% and a Quality Behaviours Index of 76%.

We are committed to putting the right people in the right place at the right time. Throughout our people’s careers, they are presented with career development opportunities, classroom, virtual classroom and on-demand learning and on-the-job real-time coaching/development. Our flexible training portfolio facilitates personalised learning with access to a variety of educational materials including webcasts, podcasts, articles, videos and courses.

Achieving a professional credential supports our firm’s commitment to quality through consistent examination and certification standards. Our goal is to provide our staff with a more individualised path to promotion and support them in prioritising and managing their time more effectively when preparing for professional exams. Providing our people with the ability to meet their professional and personal commitments is a critical component of our people experience and retention strategy.

We, and other PwC firms, are committed to delivering quality assurance services around the world. To maximise consistency in the network, the formal curricula, developed at the Network level, provide access to training materials covering the PwC audit approach and tools as well as areas of audit risk and areas of focus for quality improvement.

This formal learning is delivered using a blend of delivery approaches, which include remote access, classroom learning, virtual classroom and on-the-job support. The curricula support our primary training objective of quality, while providing practitioners with the opportunity to strengthen their technical and professional skills, including professional judgment while applying a sceptical mindset.

The design of the curricula allows us to select, based on local needs, when and to a certain extent the manner in which we will deliver the training. Our learning and education leader then considers what additional training is appropriate – formal and/or informal – to address any additional specific local needs.

The Assurance training comprises several technical update training courses and various e-learning programmes for Partners and experienced staff. The trainings focus on technical innovation and deal with topics such as risk management, independence, regulatory update, audit methodology, accounting and transformation/upskilling. In addition, we deliver core training for less experienced staff to undertake the work assigned to them and develop their professional skills.

Last but not least, if any Partner or staff member has a specific training need that cannot be covered by internal training, PricewaterhouseCoopers AG supports that individual in completing appropriate training offered and run by an external provider.

Annual assurance staff turnover rate (percentage)

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Contact us

Martina Bender

Chief People Officer , PwC Switzerland