Investing in and supporting our talent

We are committed to ensuring that our employees have the time
and opportunity to pursue their development. We support
this through personal development plans and opportunities,
coaching and mentoring, structured programmes and
self-learning.

We underpin this through our cultural and inclusive initiatives
and development programmes, including values-based training
and our inclusive culture development programme.

Our Learning Academy is central to our community-focused development approach. We offer accessible courses for everyone across the business (including part-time and contractors). Coaching and mentoring are primary approaches for us in learning, including the training of 50 employees to be qualified coaches. Training our People Managers to be coaches is also a focus for our manager development. We offer sponsorship for professional qualifications and help our people maintain continuous professional development. Our mandatory training covers our compliance needs, ensuring we meet legislative and regulatory requirements. We also have ‘always on’ sessions that support our ways of working with role-specific technical skills and soft skills. These are available for all employees and accessible through the Learning Academy system.

Engaging our employees

We welcome open and honest feedback from our employees and surveys are conducted on a regular basis. We aim to understand
job satisfaction, measure opinion and find where changes may
be necessary.

91%
Employee engagement

Pay gap reporting

Our fifth combined Gender and Ethnicity Pay Gap Report (published in November 2024, reporting the pay gap as at 5 April 2024) details our commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive work community that enhances our culture.

This year, we continue to make positive steps in reducing both our median and mean pay gaps with our median reducing by 0.7% and our mean by 0.2%. We’ve done this by focusing on three key areas: hiring, retaining and developing employees. Overall, we have increased our women hires, with 52% of all new starters being women within the last 12 months – a 6% increase year-on-year. We are pleased to have achieved our goal of reaching an equal gender split across our recruitment campaigns. We do however recognise that there is still work to do here, specifically maintaining that equal representation when hiring into senior roles.

We are performing well in retaining women in the upper quartiles, with only 15% of leavers coming from this group, compared to 53% for men. This year, we have further strengthened our maternity and family leave policies to provide even greater support for women and families throughout their careers. We also introduced our company funded Menopause Plan which provides personalised support for employees struggling to manage their symptoms. We believe these enhancements will further boost our retention of women in the future.

Download our 2024 report

Degree apprenticeship programme

Being on the degree apprenticeship programme has meant I can study for a degree at the same time as working towards becoming an experienced UX designer.

Eniya Ali 
Product Design Apprentice

Wellbeing and safety of our employees

People leaders have the opportunity to attend mental health awareness training to assist them in identifying and supporting issues that relate to people’s mental health and learn practical skills that can be used every day to help support team members. Access to mental health support and services is made available to all employees via trained Mental Health First Aiders and the Employee Assistance Programme.

We have a comprehensive ‘Respect at Work’ Policy, which emphasises the importance of maintaining a safe and respectful environment. The policy details cultural expectations and employee rights regarding bullying, discrimination and harassment, including sexual harassment,and explains our zero tolerance stance. It also outlines the reporting process and sets standards for upholding these principles outside of the workplace and during the course of employment. We provide employees with sexual harassment training and awareness sessions, including specific training on how to identify and report harassment by third parties. The training ensures that all employees understand their rights under the Equality Act 2010 and the Company’s expectations regarding inappropriate behaviour.

We provide access to tools and resources to support employees with their financial wellbeing, including access to mortgage advisors and will writing services, season ticket travel loans and salary finance.

We are committed to creating a safe office environment and to achieving high standards of health and safety and to protecting our staff and others affected by our operations. Our principal objective is to prevent or minimise accidents, injury and ill health to staff, contractors and others who work at or visit our premises. We have a fully compliant Health and Safety Policy and appropriate insurance for all employees. We can report that we have had no fatalities or serious injuries during the year, and there was no impact to our operations due to work-related incidents or work-related occupational disease.

Within our Connected Working approach, we remain committed to our people’s health and wellbeing. To support our employees, we make sure that their workstations are safe by completing DSE risk assessments of both office and home-based workstations and environments.

Roadmap: sharing stories
& experiences

In 2023, we launched Roadmap, a platform for people at Auto Trader and beyond to share their stories of building products and have lively conversations about what they're genuinely passionate about.

In this episode, Pete chats to Polly & David about their journey from joining Auto Trader as engineering & sales graduates in the early 2010s, all the way through to being senior product managers today.

View all episodes

Also in this section

Diversity & inclusion

We value a diverse and inclusive workforce, which enhances our culture and business by attracting and developing talent.

Making a positive impact

Our Auto Trader Community shapes our culture and we are committed to making a difference and having a positive impact on the communities we operate in.