Vodafone 2026 Annual Report

Vodafone Group Plc Annual Report 2026

Strategic report

Governance

Financials

Other information

Empowering People continued

Talent attraction and retention Strategy To deliver our growth strategy and develop an agile workforce, we need to compete with the external market to ensure we get the right talent, with the right skills, in the right roles – both today and in the future. This means accelerating talent development at all levels, building the next generation of leaders by unlocking the potential of our people and progressing their careers at Vodafone. Our talent strategy is underpinned by three enablers: Leading talent acquisition: Our global Employee Value Proposition (‘EVP’) is anchored in our principles, underpinned by the Spirit of Vodafone and aligned to our strategy. It clearly articulates what we stand for as an employer and captures the most compelling reasons to work at Vodafone. Leadership accountability remains central: Leaders are expected to grow talent and hold themselves and others to account. Our ongoing focus on performance and potential is driven by the ‘Grow my Impact’ framework, aligning employee goals to strategic priorities and reward outcomes to individual performance. Personalised skill and talent development: To accelerate the development of high potential talent at scale, the Talent Deal is an agreed set of expectations for both colleagues and their managers and offers support, resources, and development opportunities. To support the development of key groups, we have specific leadership interventions to accelerate their development to our most senior positions. We continue to support professional growth of all our colleagues through our global learning platform, Grow with Vodafone, and through advanced Skill Accelerators and Labs. This year over 23,000 colleagues completed these programmes. This year A year on from refreshing our global EVP, we have seen positive shifts in workplace perception and

employer brand metrics. Since its launch, our global reputation scores improved by +1.9 points from 64.4 to 66.3, moving us closer to our target of 70. This year we launched the Talent Formula, a simple framework designed to help managers identify our best talent. It considers the individual’s potential, ambition, and career path and is designed to ensure that we are finding, mobilising and coaching talent to take on bigger roles and deliver our strategy. To support leaders in making informed hiring decisions we introduced ‘License to Hire’, a self-paced, interactive digital training course designed to equip leaders with the essential skills and inclusive practices to make effective hiring decisions. To date 739 training modules have been completed by our leaders. Coaching remains available to employees through our global coaching partner and our internal network of trained coaches. We launched our Licence to Coach programme equipping leaders with coaching capabilities that unlock performance, accelerate talent growth, and strengthen change agility. This year 4,753 leaders completed the programme. We continued to review succession and development plans for senior leaders and critical roles. Talents in our key succession pools received support through leadership assessment, development planning, and coaching. We invested in early careers through our Graduate, Internships, and Apprenticeships programmes, offering practical experience across technology, digital innovation, and business leadership. This year, we welcomed 496 Global Graduates, of whom 59% were female, alongside 1,286 Global Interns, with 45% female representation, and 460 Global Apprentices, 42% of whom were female. Through partnership with universities, community organisations, and digital skills programmes, we supported young people to build confidence and skills for lasting careers through structured learning and mentorship. R ead more about our Gender Diversity across Vodafone on pages 39 to 40

As part of our three-year capability plans we continued to strengthen our business-to-business expertise by equipping our sales teams with new capabilities and evolved our offering in response to skills and product knowledge assessments, delivering training to over 5,000 employees. Our Go-To-Market learning programme supports sales within our ‘BeyondConnectivity’ portfolio, ensuring ready access to relevant learning content. We continued to scale GenAI capabilities across our markets. The Copilot AI assistant was made available through on demand learning to 49,343 users and we built momentum by progressing towards Agentic AI, with 1,947 employees upskilled and 4,324 active agents deployed. In support of our AI Governance Framework, we launched a Citizen Developer community, with an initial cohort of 30 colleagues, equipping them with the skills to build business‑impacting solutions. R ead more about our AI Governance Framework on page 51 Across all activities, our colleagues spent 3.7 million hours on learning, with an average of 40,3 hours per employee. We invested an average of €352 per employee in both mandatory and non-mandatory training to build future capabilities. Looking ahead We will continue to invest in delivering our three-year capability plans to accelerate our strategy execution. Our focus will remain on succession for critical roles and mid-career progression, supported by targeted accelerator programmes, career mobility and skills development. We will evolve our leadership expectations and development offering to align to our business strategy. We also expect to see AI further enhance our talent acquisition capabilities and learning experiences for our current employees, making AI a trusted enabler for our managers, recruiters and HR colleagues.

To deliver growth, companies must nurture diverse talent and foster a culture of continuous learning and development. Through our Vodafone Learning Organisation and supported by our Talent Acquisition Global Standards, we empower our people to develop their skills, champion internal mobility, and uphold fairness and inclusion in every hiring interaction. These efforts ensure we equip our teams with the skills needed to deliver our growth strategy and drive long- term success.

40.3 hours average learning hours per employee 1 10,974 total internal hires globally 2

Notes: 1. Globally our colleagues spent 3.7 million hours on learning. 2. T his year we have placed increased focus on mid-career progression, prioritising internal recruitment to support talent mobility and development ahead of external hiring.