As Singapore’s longest-established financial institution, the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, now OCBC, has a certain reputation to uphold. With some 10,000 employees worldwide, the bank aims to carry on what it calls a strong history of innovation and customer service in the financial sector. One of the key ways forward, says Cassandra Cheng, Head of Learning and Development, is through top quality and frequent training for staff in all roles and functions.
“At OCBC Bank, we take training very seriously,” Cheng says. “We recognise that human capital is our key differentiator and our investment in development (helps) to build the capabilities of our employees to deliver superior performance.”
Training philosophy
Cheng says OCBC’s training philosophies aim to create a working environment that is also conducive to learning. Placing learning within the ongoing business strategy helps to highlight it as an important part of the organisation and creates many win-win situations for both the company and its staff. “It enhances career satisfaction, facilitates internal job mobility, and, ultimately, (helps) manage talent within the organisation, enabling them to contribute to their fullest potential.”
She says formal learning and development programmes are structured with four objectives in mind: to create a learning culture that motivates staff to continually upgrade their skills; to facilitate development of OCBC’s wider corporate culture; to sustain OCBC’s capabilities as a high-performing bank; and to develop the talent pool to strengthen management capabilities, both now and into the future.
To these ends, OCBC boasts more than 280 internal line trainers on its books. They handle an extensive range of learning and development sessions for all functions within the bank – something Cheng says has experienced an enthusiastic take-up rate in recent years. “The culture of continuous learning has taken root in the bank, Cheng says, noting that staff are now attending far more than the minimum training hours set by HR and management.
The average training hours per employee per year has consistently been above seven days in the past three years,” she said. “That exceeds the target of five days set out in the bank’s New Horizons II five-year plan (covering the years 2006 to 2010).”
A little help from technology
Not all of that training is taking place in traditional meeting rooms or in-person seminars. Recently, OCBC has been taking advantage of new video conferencing technology to bring colleagues together throughout both the island, and the wider Asia region.
“Our latest training initiatives include virtual classroom training, which caters for a variety of banking and finance modules, as well as leadership and personal development programmes,” Cheng says. Through these, staff are able to work from the comfort of their own respective offices, but still interact with the designated trainers and fellow participants. This is done via instant messaging and creates a virtual classroom for all involved.
Cheng says OCBC is also experimenting with some of the world’s most popular internet technology. “Given today’s virtual world of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, internet technology has become an integral part of our daily lives,” Cheng says. “We recently piloted some web 2.0 technologies including sharing of learning video clips, articles and ideas within a selected pool of employees via the web.”
But it is the virtual training that has revoloutionised the way learning and development works at the bank, increasing training hours while also saving money. “In line with the Bank’s efforts to equip our employees with relevant knowledge and skills, we are widely leveraging on learning technologies like eLearning and virtual classrooms,” Cheng says. “These are in addition to the typical physical classroom trainings to support our fast-paced learning environment and reach out to our employees in different geographies.”
Building up during the downturn
OCBC didn’t create some of the headlines many financial institutions became famous for during the recession and economic downturn. Although the bank was still certainly affected, it made a point of not letting the fallout hit its valued learning and development arm. Indeed, rather than cutting back on training programmes as budgets tightened, OCBC worked to increase the number of training courses available to staff.
“Instead of scaling back training during the economic downturn, the Bank increased its number of training courses by 60%, from 25 in 2007, to 62 today,” Cheng said. “Our investments in training and development persist, even in tough times.”
Those 62 courses form the backbone of a new structured training programme, launched at the height of the downturn on January 15 this year. The OCBC Learning Academy Programme Prospectus outlines the options available to all staff. “Employees can easily and quickly identify relevant training building blocks to help them upgrade their skills and learn new ones.”
The courses are arranged into two different learning faculties. The Banking and Finance courses include a range of core banking topics that relate directly to different roles and responsibilities within the organisation. Designed for employees looking to upgrade existing skills or cross-train into new areas, these include courses on loans, treasury, investment banking and wealth management topics. The Employee Development and Leadership faculty considers more general material and so-called “soft” skills. It includes courses such as “Presentation and Assertiveness Skills” and programmes for new managers and leaders.
Looking ahead
While the current training regime is still in its infancy, Cheng and the wider HR team say it is not a static instrument. Flexibility and the capability to expand have been built into the system. “We constantly update our training programmes and ensure that they are closely aligned to role requirements in our business,” Cheng notes. “For example, during the economic downturn, we customised credit skills training programmes so as to ensure that our front-line staff including relationship managers, were able to respond proactively to their clients’ evolving needs.”
The bank has also fine-tuned some of its courses to ensure they meet new standards that have been updated by regulating authorities in the wake of the global financial crisis. Its “Risks in Financial Markets” course, for example, has recently received Financial Industry Competency Standards (FICS) accreditation from the Institute of Banking and Finance. Other relevant courses have also been updated to comply with the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s new guidelines on fair dealing within the financial services sector.