Employee Development
We believe that the group has a role to play in helping Africa’s people access opportunities for life-long education and training, enabling them to acquire the new knowledge and skills they will need as the world of work evolves. Equipping current and future employees with the appropriate emerging skills to make us future-ready is a priority for all of us.
R677,5 million has been invested in learning across the group.
14% of all employees attended management and leadership development programmes
52% of positions were filled internally at group level over the past year
We encourage continuous learning and development to ensure our people are equipped to meet the demands of a rapidly changing and increasingly digital world of work. We invest in training and development at all levels, enabling us to build a strong succession pipeline of future leaders. We invest in our people to help them become future-ready, developing their skills as the financial industry evolves.
2020 has been a watershed year as remote work, organisational transformation, and digital acceleration have all helped to fuel a culture of learning. Building on the pilot of 2019, we launched our first online learning experience platform in April called My Learning, powered by Degreed. It provides employees with access to learning content as all freely available sources of knowledge on the internet. Using machine learning, the solution continuously analyses employees’ behaviour and interests to personalise development pathways based on their unique skills, roles and learning goals. Each employee can generate and share a record of his/her completed learning. Its accessibility and use in the flow of daily work, offers relevant learning to all employees and it has contributed to a dramatic increase in learning activity during 2020.
The uptake of My Learning as a platform to access learning continues to gain momentum. Over 40 000 employees (86%) are active on the platform with 2.7 million learning items having been completed.
In line with our commitment to improve each employee’s future skills, we launched a data literacy training course, data analytics literacy fundamentals, to all staff members in Africa Regions at the beginning of 2020. Over 5 000 employees registered in the first five months of the year, and more than 50% successfully completed the training. In May, the group launched the business intelligence analyst programme, taking our data and analytics literacy culture to the next level. More than 500 employees who completed the fundamentals training went on to enrol for level 2. The programmes are complemented by regional data conferences, and our data science graduate programme, as part of a broader data academy, a platform for employees to source knowledge that will guide learning, build skills, and foster engagement and collaboration in the subject of data across the group.
In South Africa, bursaries for under- and post-graduate studies in 2020 amounted to R49 million and benefitted 1 682 employees. The bursary scheme is currently under review, to accommodate the changing landscape of learning and learning solutions as we see more funding applications shift from long-form qualifications to shorter form certificate programmes.
Our graduate programme saw 199 graduates join the group this year, 150 in South Africa and 49 from countries in Africa Regions. Individualised learning journeys, action learning projects, executive sponsorship, accelerated work experience characterise this programme that ensures that we build a strong succession pipeline for core, critical and scarce roles in our bank.
“I joined the group in 2018 as a universal learner through a learnership programme. My dream was to never go back to being unemployed. I want to reach my full potential within the group and make an impact both within the organisation and the community, by continuing to grow and develop. I am currently working as a universal banker and am studying for an honours in statistics.”
– Otshepeng Modisane, Universal Banker, Standard Bank