Automotive giant Volkswagen announced the launch of a major retraining campaign, with plans to train 22,000 production employees in electric mobility at its Wolfsburg plant, the largest car manufacturing facility in Europe.

The new training initiative comes as Volkswagen accelerates the shift of its fleet towards electric vehicles. As part of its “Way to Zero” plan unveiled in 2021, the company has committed to have at least 70% of its unit sales in Europe be all-electric vehicles by 2030. Volkswagen has also said that it will produce only electric vehicles in Europe from 2033.

In December Volkswagen announced plans to invest €460 million in the Wolfsburg site by the beginning of 2025, primarily to prepare the facility to produce its new ID.3 compact electric car, with some of the funds earmarked for retraining initiatives.

VW Plant Manager Rainer Fessel said:

“The new production line in Wolfsburg will give us more flexibility than ever before. The assembly line will be the first at one of the Volkswagen brand’s passenger car plants in Germany that is able to build both MEB and ICE vehicles on the same line. With the future SSP platform, this will make Wolfsburg Volkswagen’s first multi-platform factory a few years from now.”

As part of its training initiative, Volkswagen said that it has opened an “eMotionRoom” room at the Wolfsburg plant, an escape room-style program in which small groups of employees solve various problems in a series of rooms, alongside other training modules.

Volkswagen said that it expects to have around 1,200 employees trained for ID.3 production by the summer.

Gunnar Kilian, Board Member for Human Resources, said:

“Volkswagen is constantly working on innovative training and development concepts as we move towards becoming a provider of sustainable and software-oriented mobility. These concepts are our key to a successful transformation. The more digital our world becomes, the more crucial our team’s skills become for our competitiveness.”