Through the Institute of Banking and Finance Singapore’s (IBF) Skills Framework for Financial Services (SFwFS), financial sector professionals can identify the new and emerging skills to be acquired, relevant IBF-accredited courses and be recognised for the skills acquired for their respective roles. In addition, these IBF-accredited courses have funding support to make them accessible. IBF also ensures that the range of courses are updated and relevant to industry needs.
DBS, OCBC and UOB share their initiatives and partnerships with IBF to upskill their employees.
DBS: Triple “E” framework
DBS’s approach to preparing its workforce for the future is to empower every employee to take charge of their career growth by delivering a holistic employee value proposition with programmes designed to help employees feel purposeful, invested in, cared for, connected and valued so that they are able to achieve their fullest potential in the bank.
To build a pipeline of future leaders, DBS has its High Potential (HIPO) identification process and all identified HIPOs undergo an accelerated growth and development programme based on the comprehensive Triple “E” framework of education, exposure and experience. “We have a robust programme of preparing future leaders, rotating them, exposing them to different parts of the bank and evaluating their performance,” says Lee Yan Hong, the bank’s head of group human resources.
DBS conducts a comprehensive bank-wide talent review to assess the strength of its human capital, which takes into consideration its business strategy, the target operating model and the talent bench strength required to drive business outcomes. The bank’s recent announcement to appoint Tan Su Shan as its next group CEO attests to its efforts to groom homegrown talent, having benchmarked both internal and external candidates against a comprehensive set of objective criteria. The review process extends beyond top management to several layers down. Over the years, many key positions have been filled by its homegrown talent. Annually, over 250 succession plans are reviewed and close to 20 talent review sessions with the group CEO are held.
DBS’s Lee: We have a robust programme of preparing future leaders, rotating them, exposing them to different parts of the bank and evaluating their performance. Photo: Albert Chua/The Edge Singapore
The Triple “E” framework also applies to all employees and includes access to its DBS Academy with over 10,000 courses, 30 structured learning roadmaps and certification programmes to equip them with the latest knowledge and expertise required for their roles. Lee shares that many of these roadmaps are closely aligned to IBF’s SFwFS. At present, the bank has identified over 8,000 employees to be upskilled and reskilled based on these learning roadmaps.
Apart from educational options, employees are empowered to look out for new opportunities within the bank. For instance, they can experience what it is like to work in another team through the Be My Guest programmes, which saw employees participating in more than 4,300 job-shadowing, meeting exposures and projects outside their day jobs. This year, DBS further enhanced social learning opportunities with the launch of the Mentorship Programme in which 800 employee-mentors have already embarked on their journey through a tailored mentorship learning course.
To build on their career experience, employees can also participate in the bank’s internal mobility programme to take on new roles and grow in their careers. “In 2023, about 30% of jobs across the bank were filled by internal candidates. If we exclude entry-level roles where we hire mainly fresh graduates, or niche roles in technology that require more specialised skillsets, that figure is actually closer to 40%,” says Lee.
In 2022, DBS leveraged its experience in developing iGROW to partner IBF and the industry to create the IBF Future Skills Accelerator (FSA). iGROW provides personalised career coaching to every bank employee using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning capabilities. To date, over 10,000 of its employees in Singapore have adopted iGROW.
Additionally, DBS employees have embraced flexible working arrangements and new ways of working by breaking organisational silos through the implementation of Horizontal Organisation (HO) to drive greater collaboration and a culture that not only drives high performance but treats one another like family.
OCBC: Investment in employee development and mobility
OCBC has committed $30 million to invest in employee development and mobility from 2023 to 2025. This is on top of the $50 million invested from 2018 to 2022. A portion of the $30 million investment goes towards the bank’s talent mobility ecosystem which include skills portfolio workshops and an internal coaching certification programme.
“This, to me, is the most fundamental way we can motivate and engage our people, helping them grow with us,” says Lee Hwee Boon, the bank’s head of group human resources. “It also helps us build a more resilient workforce where there is a breadth of skills to respond to evolving roles and disruptions from technology, on top of domain expertise.”
OCBC’s Lee: To me, the most fundamental way we can motivate and engage our people is by helping them grow with us, allowing them to design their own learning and career pathways. Photo: OCBC
In March 2024, the bank launched MOBI, an AI-powered career marketplace, leveraging IBF’s FSA, that lets its employees design their own learning and career pathways with the platform’s data. The platform also lets employees prepare for their next career move with personalised skills-based recommendations such as programmes and certification pathways to short-term projects, gigs and coaching.
“The platform and tools are part of our efforts to accelerate our shift towards a skills-first approach for talent management. We firmly believe that it gives us a distinct business advantage in the ability to mobilise talent, especially in areas where the skills are specialised. It also improves overall employee engagement and retention,” OCBC’s Lee adds.
In June this year, OCBC launched OCBC Ignite, an accelerated banking career programme for polytechnic students. Upon successful completion of the programme which comprises an internship and a structured full-time apprenticeship, participants will be fast-tracked to take on university graduate-equivalent roles at the bank.
“The programme will not only empower polytechnic students with an opportunity to pick up practical skillsets that can give them a head-start in their careers, but it will also help to build a sustained pipeline of talent for the banking industry,” says OCBC’s Lee.
OCBC also prepares employees for leadership success with its suite of comprehensive programmes covering self, peer and organisational leadership. The programmes include those that were co-created together with institutions such as the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and IMD Business School.
UOB: Commitment to building employees’ future-readiness
UOB’s Better U initiative equips its employees with both technical and soft skills such as problem-solving, digital innovation and data analysis and storytelling. The programme taps on IBF’s Future Enabled Skills (FES) framework, which enables the bank to develop skills that are deemed key for current and future roles.
The Better U initiative has several layers beginning with core programmes like UOB’s flagship Better U Foundation programme, which focuses on skills that prepare its employees for current efficiency and future readiness, and banking essential modules like Overview of Banking @ UOB to ensure all employees understand the business of banking.
UOB’s Tong: This comprehensive approach ensures that our employees are well-rounded, principled yet innovative, and are empowered to drive our vision of ‘Building the future of Asean'. Photo: UOB
There is also the Better U skills development curriculum that is split into three levels. The curriculum spans lessons in project management, data analytics, AI and other critical core skills. Level One targets employees new to such skills, while Level Two is for those who already have some knowledge of those skills or are in evolving roles that require such skillsets. Level Three is for employees who are there to gain a deeper specialisation in their selected areas.
“This comprehensive approach ensures that our employees are well-rounded, principled yet innovative, and are empowered to drive our vision of ‘Building the future of Asean’,” says Dean Tong, head of group human resources at UOB.
Since its launch in 2019, the programme has seen some 26,000 participants and the bank has definitely seen some degree of success following its programmes and efforts to develop career conversion programmes for identified job roles.
“One clear case of UOB’s success would be our Group Channel Functional Academy’s efforts to upskill our bank tellers and train them to cross-sell products and services. This not only gave them deeper knowledge in their teller role, but also helped to create opportunities for the tellers, where required, to move into advisory roles that are expected to continue to be in high demand. In the process, we reskilled these tellers from ‘single role’ specialists into ‘multi-role’ specialists,” he says.
Voices of growth
When David Hui, chief commercial officer of the DBS Digital Exchange (DDEx) first joined the bank, he was an intern at its consumer banking group. Hui then joined the bank full-time as a business analyst and operations specialist, and took a two-year stint with DBS’s institutional banking group in India to pilot digital banking initiatives in the market. After building up his experiences, Hui came back to Singapore to implement some of the initiatives he has learned. Today, Hui continues to drive the intersection of blockchain and banking in his latest role.
Donna Teo, a data analyst with OCBC’s group data office, was formerly with the bank’s consumer digital business team, where she was responsible for growing the sales of OCBC’s products via its online channels. Though she had experience in marketing and web programming, Teo still lacked the skills to become a multi-disciplinary data analyst. To prepare for the role, Teo took up OCBC’s Data Certification Pathway course, where she picked up skills such as programming and coding, data governance, data storytelling and visualisation, data computation and modelling and more. The programme, which is developed jointly by the bank and Ngee Ann Polytechnic, received its accreditation from the IBF in August 2020.
UOB’s learning and development team has picked up new skills in immersive technologies in a bid to upskill themselves and adapt to the “new world of working”, says Tong.
“Our programme owners have picked up new skills in immersive technologies, including understanding areas like the metaverse, augmented reality (AR) as well as virtual reality (VR), to change the paradigms of training programme design,” he adds. “This has seen success as the team continues to incorporate AR- and VR-related modules into development programmes. We expect to incorporate more of these immersive technologies into our training programmes to enhance learner experience, while leveraging artificial intelligence in the training process.
