What Banks Need To Know About Making The Business Case For IT Training

How can bank CIOs justify the expenses involved in providing training to their employees? It’s all about having the skills that enable the company to make decisions, predict client requirements and profitably manage the business.

One-Stop Training Resource

Debbie A. Herd (pictured at right), Senior VP, Director of Talent Management and Learning, Comerica

Comerica colleagues represent our most important asset, and the bank is committed to making an ongoing effort in their growth and development. Beginning in 2013, compliance as well as an increasing selection of other bank-wide training is provided through "Your Talent Center," our one-stop, integrated internal portal for learning and training. Your Talent Center also is host to our performance management process, succession management program and employee talent profiles.

Learning opportunities in Your Talent Center are individualized to colleagues' personal learning needs. Available resources for learning include videos, flow charts, demonstrations, live webinars, "how to" instruction guides and detailed e-learning courses. We assign required compliance courses to colleagues based on their roles in the company. We require that all new employees complete all of the regulatory and corporate-required training within 45 days of their hire date.

Your Talent Center offers a number of in-person and virtual classroom training events, to provide colleagues with the learning opportunities they need to succeed. You can search for a classroom event by course title, by topic or even by the calendar date the session will be offered.

Sample training subjects include diversity at Comerica, anti-money-laundering compliance, information privacy and protection, sustainability awareness, workplace harassment/discrimination awareness, corporate records management and fair lending anti-discrimination overview.

Your Talent Center offers managers the ability to view the progress of their staffs' training through user-friendly progress reports. Managers are also able to see their employees' stated career interests, performance ratings and competency assessments.

The ROI Of Training

Josh Haims (pictured at right), Principal, Human Capital Practice, Deloitte Consulting

The workplace has changed considerably in the past five years, and the rate of change is actually accelerated with the inclusion of social media, collaboration tools that are being used internally in organizations, the pressures of regulatory requirements, cloud-based technologies and the emergence of the front-line IT leader as business strategist. Over the past few years, proliferating customer touch points, mobile, social media and other channels are dramatically changing the face of customer engagement with organizations, and technologists must be ahead of those changes.

Learning has shifted similarly. Learning is coming out of the classroom and has become more embedded into the way people work. Concepts of social learning and on-the-job learning are becoming more accepted, creating innovation in learning around organizations being driven by chief learning officers.

We're seeing several areas of innovation in learning and learning for IT and technology organizations. First is nontechnology training, focusing on critical thinking, judgment, relationships and collaboration. More than ever, technologists must have these professional competencies. Next is innovation in the delivery method for training. Immersive learning or experiential simulations, for instance, involve complex learning simulations that bring groups of individuals together in person or on a Web-based platform to learn new skills, processes and workflows that are scenario-based, consequence-driven and allow people to test their mettle in a safe environment with little risk.

Innovation that focuses on customer experience is another area. Technology learning in the past tended to focus on systems you need to use to execute processes. That still exists, but leading organizations are now looking at customer touch points, how you interact with internal and external stakeholders, and what the critical touch points are. Apply the technology needs in training to customers' needs, creating a much higher-impact training experience and a better outcome for customers, whether they're internal or external clients.

If banking executives do not support the development of their IT professionals, they risk not being in tune with or ahead of their customers who are demanding more technology-enabled solutions. Today, the success of organizations is so heavily reliant on technology to make decisions, to predict client requirements, to manage the business and to interact with clients. That's how to justify training costs. The ROI is in the future of your business being successful.

Align Training With Strategy

Elaine Miller (pictured at right), Financial Services Managing Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers

With regulatory pressure and technological advancements accelerating the pace of change in the industry, IT is emerging as a critical lever to growth, competitive differentiation and risk mitigation. Thus, we find that today's most pressing IT training needs align directly with overarching enterprise priorities, including compliance, big data and digital technology. From a compliance standpoint, embedding a robust, systemic understanding of how to leverage IT capabilities to automate critical processes, monitor liquidity requirements, enhance transparency and the like can substantially reduce risk exposure and streamline expenses. In the vein of cost containment and integration, we are seeing a trend toward consolidation and shared services.

For companies choosing that path, IT training focused on ensuring knowledge capture and transfer is absolutely essential. Additionally, as the digital economy continues to redefine how offerings are developed and delivered, a recent PwC study found that less than 20% of the sector believes their organization has the requisite skills to optimize the potential of mobile platforms. The payoff for investing in IT training and infrastructure is significant. According to our research, organizations that closely link technology and business strategy and promote strong collaboration between the C-suite and the CIO are four times as likely to be top performers.

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Peggy Bresnick Kendler has been a writer for 30 years. She has worked as an editor, publicist and school district technology coordinator. During the past decade, Bresnick Kendler has worked for UBM TechWeb on special financialservices technology-centered ... View Full Bio