The Jupiter Fixed Income team have engaged with PeopleCert on a range of topics, from climate risk to their gender pay gap and carbon emissions.

 

PeopleCert delivers exams in more than 200 countries, in 25 languages, through its state-of-the-art assessment technology, enabling professionals to reach their full potential and realise their life ambitions through certifications and learning. To date, they have worked with 2,000 training organisations and delivered 5.5 million examinations to individuals, 50,000 companies and 800 government departments.

 

Whilst clearly benefitting society from the provision of education, we found their website disclosures to be very sparse without much focus on publishing any key data metrics.
With that in mind prior to meeting we had requested several stats which they were able to compile and send to us.

 

Reflecting on the environmental impact of their business they say: “PeopleCert is committed to minimizing its environmental impact, safeguarding labour and human rights, equality and diversity, promoting safe working conditions, fostering mental health and well-being, and providing effective learning opportunities to its employees. We are strongly committed to promoting a sustainability agenda that is relevant to our professional services delivery and strategy for organizational management. To this end, we endeavour to establish a positive social, economic, and environmental legacy in all areas of our operations, reinforcing our commitment to value creation for all stakeholder groups.”

 

We emphasised that we would need a lot more disclosure for our Article 8+ fund predominantly in the form of answering the 14 Principal Adverse indicatorsi . We ran through carbon accounting and why this was necessary as well as all the other stats including unadjusted gender pay gap stats and board gender diversity.

 

Currently, the only Scope 3 emissions provided by PeopleCert are those coming from emissions related to water as set out in third row of table below:

We asked for detailed TCFD reporting and the status of this was explained to us by the following statement: “Currently, the incorporation of climate risk into PeopleCert stress testing frameworks and internal models is minimal. This is due to the level of exposure in climate risk being low for PeopleCert activities. Moving forward, PeopleCert will investigate the need to take further action.”

 

The share of non-renewable energy consumption of PeopleCert is the share of the national electricity grid in Greece (74%). During the meeting management talked through initiatives they had such as encouraging employees to drive electric and hybrid vehicles and using energy-efficient appliances. They will also promote the usage of a car-pool scheme enabling individuals to travel together in one vehicle thus aiding an overall reduction in fuel consumption.

 

PeopleCert say they convert all exam related paper supply (90% of total consumption) to recyclable paper, and PeopleCert’s hazardous waste ratio equates to 4.5% of total waste.

 

PeopleCert is in the process of developing an official monitoring mechanism of the gender pay gap. They say that PeopleCert provides its services to customers globally, therefore, diversity of their staff is paramount to ensure they can provide exceptional and high-quality services to their global customers and stakeholders. They are proud to be the employer of an extremely diverse team, with over 1,000 employees from 42 nationalities, varying ages, religions, preferences, etc. PeopleCert’s workforce gender representation rates are close to 50% at all hierarchical levels including the Executive Team where membership is 50% female and 50% male.

 

Currently PeopleCert’s Board of Directors is comprised only of males. They are working towards inclusion of females within their Board of Directors as well as continuing to ensure appropriate balance of male and female membership within the PeopleCert Executive Team.  

Other Societal Benefits 

Active Women Initiative 

In 2014 PeopleCert got involved in the project ‘Active Women’, which provided women over 50 years old, immigrants and refugees the opportunity to become trained and certified in digital skills, thereby promoting gender equality.

 

ECDL Hellas
ECDL is the internationally recognised standard in ICT skills and is relevant to anyone who wishes to become competent in the use of a computer and common applications. To date over 15,000,000 people have engaged with the ECDL programme in more than 100 countries. The responsible national body of ECDL in Greece is PeopleCert.

 

To date they have certified 353,347 candidates of whom 66,36 % are women. For the newly designed Digital Marketing Certification a total of 263 candidates have passed the exam out of whom 63,12% are women.

 

PeopleCert is the global leader in the assessment and certification of professional skills, partnering with multi-national organisations and government bodies to develop and deliver market leading exams worldwide. Since 2011, they have certified 356,106 women in IT with Certifications such as COBIT5, DevOps, ITIL, LEAN IT, Service Desk, TRIM, DevOps, Scrumii.

Takeaways

We ended the meeting by encouraging PeopleCert to add the information that they had provided us on their social activities to their website. We also asked them to measure and publish their Principle Adverse Indicators data and EU Taxonomy alignment and begin work on their TCFD reporting.   

The value of active minds – independent thinking

A key feature of Jupiter’s investment approach is that we eschew the adoption of a house view, instead preferring to allow our specialist fund managers to formulate their own opinions on their asset class. As a result, it should be noted that any views expressed – including on matters relating to environmental, social and governance considerations – are those of the author(s), and may differ from views held by other Jupiter investment professionals.

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