Career trajectory: learning and growth

Credit Agricole Bank has created and is successfully developing three corporate training programs that promote professional competencies of employees as well as foster favourable environment for their professional growth.

We all believe that following its victory Ukraine will enter the era of booming economic growth with businesses serving as the moving force. The businesses that have been undergoing continuous transformation during the recent years. Therefore, the search for innovative strategies and creation of the efficient teams to implement the former are among the urgent objectives for top managers.

The war highlighted the undeniable truth that the team is a company’s greatest asset. Now, when the market is faced with shortage of qualified workforce, we invest even more in the development of our employees.

We at Credit Agricole have created a holistic ecosystem of motivational and training programs aimed at increasing out team’s expertise while simultaneously ensuring the steadfast development of our bank.

Strategic goals of the ecosystem

1. To form a personnel reserve for managerial positions. We implement new approaches that offer the prospective leaders growth opportunities for both vertical and lateral professional trajectory. This way we foster the creation of diverse career paths and ensure that the bank can take advantage of the reliable staff reserves and resilience.
2. Increase expertise of employees as well as their stress resistance and adaptability.
3. Improve job satisfaction.
4. Ensure staff retention by offering career growth prospects and opportunities.

100% of managerial positions in Credit Agricole were filled by internal candidates in 2023. At the same time, employee turnover rate among those who participated in training was below 3%.

Work planning

Specific key performance indicators (KPI) have been set for the learning projects. I would like to go more in-depth for some of them in order to show the interconnection between the business indicators and the effective HR strategy. Credit Agricole is a strategic partner for the agribusiness, so one of our objectives has been increasing our agrarian customers’ satisfaction by 10% during the next year and improving the total customer loyalty index.

When planning our learning programs, we conducted a large-scale internal survey that revealed the following key insights: on the one hand, employees mentioned the lacking career growth prospects within the bank, on the other hand, they only considered their career on the vertical plane. They were not willing to take on the new challenges and risks of lateral moves delving into the new areas of activity when the opportunity presented itself.

Therefore, we set an objective to modify the career growth trajectory within the company and create new development opportunities: vertical and horizontal. The war merely amplified our cross-functional approach – we increased the number of internal mobility cases and transfers between various business units.

In order to reach this goal, we developed three corporate learning programs: “AgroSchool”, “Proximity University”, “Managerial School”.

Managerial School

This program targets bank employees with managerial experience and their successors. Its key objective is expanding managerial competences of employees: strategic planning, effective communication, management of changes and leadership. The program enhances career growth opportunities and strengthening of the bank’s governance competence. In the course of training, all participants are provided with mentorship support from the bank’s top management and participate in development and implementation of practical tasks to improve the bank’s business processes in the current project portfolio.

Proximity University

Credit Agricole Ukraine has 139 outlets nationwide. For the network employees, we developed a specialized learning program. It is aimed at developing their key professional competences such as being customer-oriented and management skills by stimulating their career growth and forming staff reserves.

Our employees get the immersive experience of the real student life as part of the six departments that we launched based on the bank’s business lines. The entire training curriculum has been developed and implemented exclusively by our in-house experts. It is an online-only program, which enables us to include colleagues from all over Ukraine who can perform their job tasks with minimal interruption.

“Proximity University” is unique due to being tailored to specific needs of every employee, as each one is supposed to choose from among the six departments taking into account one’s current experience and career ambitions. Such approach allows for optimizing the learning process and maximizing its effectiveness.

AgroSchool

In cooperation with the agrarian team of our bank, we launched the “AgroSchool” learning program to address the specific objective: to improve the level and quality of agribusiness customer service. The key idea of the project is to train the bank employees so that they could speak the same language with the agrarian business customers to better meet their needs. I would like to specifically mention the business game, which is part of the project. It is an individually developed practical assignment aimed at uniting bank employees from different departments in order to solve the daily operational tasks of the bank’s agrarian customers. This way, the colleagues get really close to the customer’s production cycle. Such approach enables us to facilitate the process of considering customers’ requests (from the perspective of cooperation between units and understanding the customer’s needs).

Every learning project has its own curriculum, teachers, study materials, interim testing system. Implementation stages cover separate training programs of varying duration going on simultaneously:

• “AgroSchool” lasts for 18 months.
• “Proximity University” takes 5 months.
• “Managerial School” duration – 8 months.

Different mentors are involved in each course, including the management of the bank. The graduates defend their diploma projects and take general testing.

I would like to mention the non-material motivation in the course of the training. Each of our students has a clearly defined goal he or she would like to accomplish upon successfully completing the training program. However, we would like to employ the additional tools to incentivize and encourage employees. The new offer is a key element that gave the learning programs alumni the opportunity to transfer to managerial positions or participate in the new projects where they could apply their newly-acquired skills and knowledge. Those graduates, who demonstrated high potential and efficiency, were considered for promotions. This option has become a significant incentive for developing their career within the bank. Also, we did organize a veritable graduation celebration with the top managers of the bank handing out diplomas, including those with honours to the most diligent students.

Our projects emphasize the fact that contemporary career path is not linear; it is a multidimensional system with multiple branches and opportunities for vertical and horizontal growth. Our learning programs meet the challenges of modernity by ensuring flexibility and versatility of career development. It is a unique approach that encourages our employees to develop in various directions to address the continuously evolving job market conditions. This project is an example of how new approaches to training can support strategic goals of a company in the context of challenges.

Olena Urusova, HR Director at Credit Agricole Bank