The latest human resources event, Skills of the Future, looked at the skills best suited to the new reality, how to improve them, and how to create value through digitalization.

Banca Transilvania was represented by Nevenca Doca, Senior Executive Director of Human Resources. Her remarks came in the context of BT reframing its organizational strategy in 2016, with a commitment to deliver positive customer experiences, anytime, anywhere. What followed to support the strategy through people, skills, healthy habits and digital tools:

• Assessing BT’s tools to deliver on the bank’s promise to customers. Among other initiatives, we launched a pilot: an HR chatbot. Our digital colleague, AIDA, helps with all administrative and operational processes, from leave requests to employment certificates and addenda to employment contracts, for our more than 9,000 employees. For example, in the two months of the state of emergency, there were 66,000 queries to the chatbot from our colleagues, which otherwise would have meant just as many phone calls or emails to the HR team.
  
  
• Developing skills: one example is the project that reskilled 20 banking colleagues into developers in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Run in 2018 in a hybrid format — partly online and partly classroom-based — the project meant a career transformation for 20 of our colleagues. The RPA upskilling took 3 months, after which they moved to the Digital Transformation department, opening up the opportunity for a new career in a new, high-potential field, still within Banca Transilvania.
  
  
• Building healthy habits: at BT we know the human dimension differentiates us as a financial institution. That’s why we put it on BT’s list of strategic priorities and made it operational. Caring for the team you lead ("who") is a mandatory competency at BT for all categories of managers and is measured every 6 months. We also continuously encourage and develop collaboration, which is a core competency for all BT employees.
  
  
• Ongoing assessment of tools: collaboration platforms, forums, learning groups, etc. Based on these assessments, we customize employees’ learning journeys, work with managers and colleagues who act as learning consultants, define learning pathways and tailor them. We always take context into account: for example, over 1,000 BT employees work in the front office and, given their direct interaction with customers, it’s hard for them to access learning platforms while at the bank, so for them we introduced a new benefit: one day per quarter for Learn from Home.

Other remarks from the speakers:

• Skills are about the present and the future, about the scarcity or abundance of resources.
• Continuous learning and adaptation will be key to the success of people and companies in the years ahead.
• We need people with the right skills in the right roles. These skills must be developed, and people need motivation and context. People and companies are in motion — up or down.
• There is a big difference between timely skills and timeless skills. It is also essential that the personal skills you develop align with those of the team and the company.
• Companies need to teach employees how to learn;
• The pace of change keeps increasing, and daily learning is essential for today’s and tomorrow’s world. Practice is fundamental; there is a cycle of learning and error. Tomorrow’s leaders need to learn from today’s leaders, because collaborative learning is essential.
• Companies talk about employee health. To keep our humanity, we need a mix that includes digital skills and empathy, a concern for the feelings of the people we work with.
• The skills of the future are human skills. Connecting with people matters, including online. It is said that each person will have 2 – 3 careers over a lifetime. Let’s move to the question what do I want to learn? And then I know I also need to unlearn and be (more) aware that I have to learn something new. We need to bring learning into adult life. How will we be there for 3 careers? We need to realize what we don’t know and make scenarios for what we want to learn. Then it’s about discipline, taking responsibility for learning, and time management — which has shifted to employees — while companies need to create a pathway, a learning experience. Learning pathways are designed by specialists in the company or by partner firms in the field.
• The pandemic created the need to develop additional skills, one of which is listening on the part of managers. Just as important remain knowledge transfer and coaching, especially as new elements have emerged in the level of collaboration.
• Everyone has a standard set of skills and competencies. Personal development is, in fact, the development of new skills.
• On the labor market, capabilities are emerging that were not previously in demand. Future skills are a special category and deserve our full attention.
• Potential areas of opportunity and trends — with the associated skills — can be seen in jobs we hadn’t heard of before, which are now recruiting.

The event was organized by Skills Of The Future and Marcom Hub – Bucharest, with the support of Banca Transilvania, Kaspersky, FintechOS, Orange, Learning Architect and ATLAS - atlas.app.