Our People

At Chemring, our people are at the heart of everything we do and are key to our organisation’s growth strategy. We invest in our people at all levels, across every location and function. This focus ensures we have the right people enabled to perform and support our growth plans.

Our talent markets continue to be challenging, with the expectations of colleagues to have a best in class employee experience at Chemring. Although inflationary pressures are easing across our key markets, the cost of living challenge remains for our colleagues. We pay competitively and offer purposeful and impactful careers which support our customers, the end users of our products and services.

Our overall people approach is focused on five key areas:

Having the right people ready to perform
An understanding of our talent pipelines
Clear leadership and capability development programmes
A focus on the engagement and retention of our people
An underpinning of diversity, equity & inclusion in everything we do through our culture at Chemring

Chemring Culture

We are proud of our values-based culture and the areas of Safety, Excellence and Innovation are the focus of everything we do. As a group of companies we leverage value through embracing what ties us together and respecting what differentiates us. Our principle of Global Voice, Local Accent defines the approach to investing in our people to bring the best of our corporate programmes whilst ensuring our business units bring their local unique customs and practices to engage and empower the workforce.

Our Population

Our business units each have an individual focus on the skills and talent it needs, as well as a clear understanding of its local talent markets, and, with that, a focus on building a truly diverse workforce. Chemring strives for diversity on a broad basis including gender, age, background, education, disability, neurodiversity and nationality (within the constraints of our regulatory requirements) and this diversity brings a more agile, engaged and higher-performing workforce.

Gender diversity is one measure that we monitor throughout our population and programmes. Our total global population in 2024 was:

We benchmark our external local talent markets and work continuously to seek ways to attract, engage and retain a diverse workforce.

As we continue to grow as an organisation, we also continue to focus on creating a best in class employee experience through our people strategy. 2024 has seen a number of new “digital first” HR tools launched across the Group to modernise and improve the efficiency of our approach, from employee-centric HR information systems to localised employee listening tools getting to the heart of what’s important to our colleagues. We also continue to look at ways to leverage the ever evolving Microsoft 365 platform as a way to improve how people collaborate and get work done for our “online” colleagues.

Our talent pipelines

To cultivate a diverse and broad workforce, we tap into various internal and external talent pipelines. We recruit from a wide array of external channels, targeting direct hires for critical areas in the Company, as well as aspiring professionals early in their career journey. Moreover, we adopt new strategies to develop talent streams in unconventional areas, like through the Roke Academy, which offers individuals from diverse professional backgrounds the opportunity to learn skills that are vital for our future needs. In 2024 we have partnered with organisations such as Women in Defence and attended the Defence Women’s Network Conference to meet potential talent looking for roles in our industry.

We evolved our early careers UK programme in 2024 to create two streams focusing more explicitly on our two sectors. This change has allowed each programme to focus on its unique sector-specific story and develop skillsets in line with its organisational plans.

Our focus on talent also extends to supporting the pipelines of talent moving through our organisation. Our talent assessment activities are centred around the need to plan and develop to solve today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities. We actively seek ways to create opportunities for our talent to gain those experiences before they are needed.

Our talent programme, Aspire@Chemring, launched in May 2022 and its second cohort graduated in August this year. Aspire@Chemring is designed to connect a global cohort of future senior leaders and provide experiences designed to open their perspectives to future roles as Leaders of People or Leaders of Subject Matter Expertise (“SME”).

We aim to collaborate with industry peers and governmental bodies to enhance the skills and movement of professionals into our organisation. As an active member of the Ministry of Defence led Defence Suppliers Forum, we are helping to shape solutions to the sector-wide challenge of bringing diverse STEM talent into the sector, one that we are all facing.

In the UK, we’ve worked with the Institute of Engineering and Technology (“IET”) for the past five years, providing scholarships to students from underprivileged backgrounds, enabling educational opportunities otherwise inaccessible. This variety in background introduces unique viewpoints within Chemring, which is evident when our IET scholarship recipients engage in summer internships and from those who have been successful in securing full-time roles with Chemring at graduation.

Leadership and capability development

Our focus on internal talent is as important as identifying and securing external talent. We offer development opportunities for all colleagues, not only to ensure we have the right skills, in the right place, at the right time, but to engage our workforce with meaningful and impactful careers.

We see development as a strategic enabler for meeting our business and customer commitments, and it continues to serve our growth plans by ensuring we can develop our internal talent as well as seeking external talent. We use Performance Conversations as a tool to align personal career aspirations to business objectives and as a way to understand and engage with our colleagues and their individual aspirations.

We continue to run our established group development programmes, which include our two-year early careers programme, our supervisor focused Leading Our People programme, and our talent development programme, Aspire@Chemring. Aspire@Chemring graduated its second cohort of 52 global talent in 2024, creating new networks and inspiring our future senior leaders.

In the UK, we continue to utilise the Apprenticeship Levy to maximise apprentice development opportunities at the entry, middle and senior levels, covering specialist skillsets and functional competency.

Engagement and retention

Our workforce is the driver of our success, and we aim to put the employee experience at the forefront of our decision making. Our external talent markets remain extremely competitive and therefore the engagement and retention of our workforce is a people imperative.

Listening to all colleagues is essential to understand what’s important to our workforce, and since this will differ across our global organisation, in 2024, we moved to using local listening tools and technologies to ensure they gathered the specific “Local Accent”. This enables the tools used locally to be tailored to the local cultures, contexts, environments and working practices, and ensures that the action taken is as effective and impactful to that employee group. We therefore no longer have a single consolidated employee positivity metric for the Group, instead prioritising each business unit’s individual positivity scores with the majority of positivity results in the 73-75% range, reflecting the local relevance of opportunities each business has to continuously improve.

Furthermore there are many ways in which our colleagues are engaged with individually, from one-to-one performance conversations to works councils and Employee Resource Groups (“ERGs”). In many of our businesses, leadership make themselves available through all-hands town hall meetings in which any colleague can raise questions.

Laurie Bowen, non-executive director and Remuneration Committee Chair, is tasked with employee engagement for the Board. For the fourth consecutive year, Laurie has connected with colleagues across the Company, at a variety of levels and in differing roles, focusing on business units experiencing change and transformation. Visiting Roke, Chemring Energetic Devices in Chicago, Chemring Countermeasures in PA and Chemring Countermeasures in Salisbury, she explored how their business’ respective organisational change was going and was encouraged to hear of how the ambitious vision for our companies is being translated into our colleagues’ day-to-day experiences.
Areas of feedback in 2024 included the acknowledgement of local leadership teams’ efforts to involve and engage the workforce in the changes in the businesses, whilst highlighting the challenges of communications keeping up with the rapid pace of change. Safety remains a top priority in the eyes of our colleagues who speak up when they identify improvement opportunities,
which has extended beyond physical safety into the wellbeing agenda in 2024. Laurie also heard of the maturing of our standards and processes in line with our business growth, to ensure our operational efficiency serves our business targets and ambitions. The groups identified specific opportunities to improve, which were openly and constructively communicated, and summarised to the leadership teams for action as part of their local employee engagement action planning process.

Thanks to this feedback, our local leadership teams at these locations can ensure that employee feedback informs and supports their growth agendas. Employee feedback remains a key channel for insights into how we can shape Chemring’s employee engagement priorities both at a local level and Group level.

This approach is how we focus on developing our culture so that it serves our colleagues and our customers. We work to the principle of embracing what ties us together and respecting what differentiates us. Our values driven culture is based on our values of Safety, Excellence and Innovation and is the foundation all our businesses work to.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ("DE&I")

We have continued our focus of 2023 into 2024 to mature our processes, driving improvements to our gender balance in senior management positions.

We believe that it is important to include all members of senior management who influence the day-to-day employee experience and lead our culture.
Our definition of this population is what we monitor to ensure that all these senior leadership positions continue to be developed towards a more gender balanced and inclusive population.

We define senior management positions as Executive/Senior Leadership, direct reports to Executive/Senior Leadership (if in a leadership role) and key positions holding a senior position or role of influence in the organisation, with a 2027 target of at least 33% female and 67% male.

Our organisation grew in 2024 and talent challenges in the external market have had a minor impact on our gender split which is 31% female and 69% male. Our growth is challenging us to think differently about how we can continue to develop our gender diversity within the organisation. We remain on target to meet our 2027 goals as well as continuing to deliver gender diversity in our growing workforce.

We recognise that Chemring has a role to influence the external talent market where possible to ensure a strong gender balanced pipeline is grown. In 2024, we are proud to have signed the UK Women In Defence Charter and attended the Defence Women’s Network Conference, which signals our commitment to improving gender diversity in the defence sector.

In 2023 we added the requirement for DE&I to be considered within our five-year planning activities which we have continued in 2024. Gender is not the only focus of our efforts. Chemring strives for diversity on a broad basis including gender, age, background, education, disability, neurodiversity and ethnicity (within the constraints of our regulatory requirements). This is an area where we continue to develop both globally and locally and which will be central to our success in the coming years.

We continue to focus on ethnicity at the various levels within our organisation, as a way of ensuring our workforce is reflective of the communities we are situated in and operate within. Our reporting on ethnic diversity at Chemring is set out in the table below.

	Asian %	Black %	Mixed race %	White %	Other* %
Senior managers	2.7	0.9	-	96.4	-
Mid-level managers	1.5	8.0	0.4	87.5	2.6
All other employees	4.0	11.7	2.1	78.9	3.3

* Including Hispanic, NHOPI, Native American.

Our communities

Chemring takes its commitment to enhancing social value seriously, both at the local and national level in the regions we operate within.

With a geographically diverse group of businesses, the “Local Accent” element which balances our “Global Voice” is of great importance to us. No more so than in how our businesses represent and integrate into the local communities of which we form a part. All of our workforces have strong local ties to the community, and we see numerous charity and volunteering efforts from our workforce which serve those communities.

The education sector is another area of focus with the opportunity to provide STEM sponsorship and support in local schools and colleges. Our IET bursary sponsorship further targets socially and economically deprived students to try and create a more level, diverse and inclusive STEM pipeline.

Investing in this community today helps us to build a broader and more diverse pool of talent to join the engineering and defence sectors in years to come.
In addition, we partner with charities that directly support those who are end users of our products and services. We honour the service that they have given through the support of events such as “Ride with a Veteran” and through our support of veteran networks like the US Marine Corps charity Marine Toys for Tots Foundation.