Training For Banking Jobs: Onboarding

The Challenge: Training For Banking Jobs

Recruiting and training people for banking jobs is an expensive affair. With one in five recruits not accepting a job offer and two in six employees not lasting longer than a year, it can prove to be a time-consuming and costly exercise. It’s sure to be quite challenging for an organization to align its new employees with the company culture. Similarly, it tends to be overwhelming for the new employee to not just understand how the company works but to quickly start performing.

Existing induction programs are usually full of information given to the new employees in their first few days of reporting. It doesn’t allow trainers the time to support their learners or go through the more difficult stuff in more detail. It also lacks the kind of oomph that gets trainees excited about their new roles.

The Solution When Training Employees For Banking Jobs

Onboarding new recruits should typically last months and ought to be considered a long-term effort. Often confused with orientation, which includes formal training and human resources-related tasks, onboarding is key to employee retention, culture alignment, happiness, and productivity. Think of orientation as the first step to a longer onboarding phase.

In an ideal onboarding phase, new recruits will feel excited and appreciated. Their experience will be dynamic, transparent, and modernized. The consequences of providing a substandard experience are quite severe. Not so surprisingly, companies lose 28% of new employees before they complete their first year, often due to a poor induction and onboarding experience.

Objectives Banks Should Set

Leave new hires excited, informed, and well-equipped to perform their duties.
Get rid of mundane tasks that usually weigh down the experience.
Commission well-known partners when structuring a program.
Leverage technology to ensure flexible learning.
Introduce a feedback mechanism at the end of each outcome.

The objectives above provide a basic, structured approach to induction and onboarding. In the banking and financial services industry, formal training programs range anywhere from three weeks to six weeks. These include technical and job-related training, such as financial modelling, through company-specific training including the bank’s mission and future road map.

Onboarding Should Begin Before A New Employee’s First Day

Banking is well known for being a competitive industry. Good candidates are usually very sought after. This is why, during the interview stage, hiring managers should be prepared to answer any questions an interviewee might have, and represent the bank’s interest in assuring them that there is a mutually beneficial fit between the bank and the candidate.

Once a new hire is deemed a good fit and accepts the job offer, the preboarding process should begin. Constant communication is at the core of a successful preboarding process and will play an important role in landing a great first impression. The key questions to land a great first impression are:

Does the new employee know what to expect next?
Can all the documentation and paperwork be completed before their first day?
Does the new hire feel a sense of excitement and validation?

How You Can Ensure Productivity From The First Day

Traditional onboarding programs focus on covering organizational working, HR-related requirements, products, processes, and systems. This ends up being an information overload for the new recruits, without usually providing them with the confidence to apply the learning at their workplace. The consequence is a confused new recruit, who avoids work due to a lack of confidence.

Onboarding programs must ensure that learners constantly keep an eye on the task they perform and acquire relevant skills and the knowledge to perform those tasks. The training structure should mirror an actual work day of the new recruits. The banking and finance industry faces high attrition, especially of new recruits with 0-6 months of tenure. This is usually because new recruits struggle with a lack of confidence and are unable to apply their knowledge at work and therefore don’t produce early wins.

Conclusion

Onboarding programs must ensure the application of skills and knowledge happens immediately, and that the learner can demonstrate success and gain confidence within the training period. It’s important to provide a sustained learning path to learners and focus on continuous learning, which helps them systematically learn and improve even after joining the workplace