Human capital management
Above: With new digital- related skills increasingly important, banking is just one of the industries rushing to react.
Opposite: Research suggests that employers can save thousands of pounds per employee if they support their desire to learn and improve skills.
(necessary to complete work-related functions), and skills used every day (soft skills) is important here. According to the Infosys survey, workers considered feedback, a soft skill, more important than their managers did, potentially impacting both their professional relationships and how effective their work can be.
18 EY 10-12
The number of roles the average person can expect to have in their lifetime.
Lloyds Banking Group 36
The average number of job positions someone from Generation Z will hold in their lifetime.
Connecting the disconnected Muddying the waters further is a lack of appreciation around the importance of training. “We have seen incredible advances in technology – quickly,” explains Darran Marks, managing director at the Swindon and Wiltshire Institute of Technology (SWIoT), which delivers industry-led higher technical training and apprenticeships. “But what we haven’t seen is the investment in the infrastructure and training that will embed it.” It’s a glaring and increasingly obvious oversight. In May 2022, the Learning and Work Institute in the UK warned investment in employee training had ‘plummeted’ by almost a third (28%), putting hopes for a high-skill, high-wage economy at risk. But if banks thought they could recruit their way to filling the skills void, they’d be wise to think again. Research earlier this year suggested the financial recruitment market remained tight, with the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants finding that candidates were still able to dictate terms such as higher wages to desperate employers. The logical solution would presumably be to up- and reskill from within banks.
Marks, for his part, agrees, suggesting employers should develop and invest in the people they already have, where shared learning is encouraged. “I’d urge any employer to create stakeholder groups to encourage ownership, sharing accountability and in turn developing skills,” he says.
In the UK, one industry giant to go in this direction is Lloyds Banking Group. “Reskilling is
becoming more important as we see an increasingly competitive environment when it comes to recruiting and retaining technical talent across the UK,” says Ben Auty, the group’s organisation and capability director. Responsible for building skills and capabilities for its future success, Auty says the evolution of technology will require an increasing focus on tech-astute specialists. “To be successful,” he argues, “we will need more cross-skilling, upskilling and reskilling to ensure our people have the right tools to perform future roles.” Upskilling is the process of developing new skills that will – largely in the workplace – advance capabilities and open up new professional opportunities for staff. In practice, training can range from watching online learning videos and tutorials, via the likes of LinkedIn Learning or Coursera Plus, to formal training such as apprenticeships and further education. Reskilling, for its part, typically refers to the process of learning new skills to enable employees to move to different roles. Like others in banking, a sector dead set on digital transformation, Lloyds also launched an initiative to determine how it could equip its engineering teams for new ways of working – and the technologies staff need to succeed. Headed by its chief technology officer, it decided training and development should include three elements: collaboration, experimentation, and enough time to learn continuously. Speaking more broadly, Auty says Lloyds is training staff in traditional roles – those branch managers and in-branch customer service operatives – to learn new skills around data science and engineering. To this end, the bank established a team to develop and manage the strategy around a year ago. As Auty explains: “Our dedicated reskilling team is helping bridge the gap by investing in colleagues, and helping them realise their potential by looking at how we can build on existing skills, and what we need to be successful.” Earlier this year, Lloyds also launched a career mobility policy, encouraging movement and skills growth across its business. “For example, we have seen some of our branch managers reskilling and taking on roles such as quality engineers,” Auty says. “On the face of it, they have a completely different set of skills. However, we found that critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration skills are also used in the quality engineering space.” To supplement this philosophy, the bank also designed a 12-week intensive bootcamp, concluding with an industry- recognised qualification.
Building a better future
For Marks, this kind of evolution is important. Even so, he emphasises, banks are still challenged to secure the right talent in the first place. As a snapshot, between April and June 2022, five in every 100 banking roles across the UK remained unfilled, the highest ever recorded.
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
Swindon and Wiltshire Institute of Technology
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