Reskilling: BBVA trains its employees in new strategic skills
The Camp is the new reskilling and upskilling proposal for BBVA employees. Through an innovative training ecosystem, the bank’s workforce will be able to reinforce, update or deepen their knowledge in the skills identified as pivotal to promote the transformation and the future of the bank. All of this using gamification tools, which make it possible to design more familiar and attractive experiences for employees that increase their level of commitment during the learning process.
Even before the current crisis, the fast pace of technological advances have been significantly and rapidly changing the skills employees need in order to do their work on a daily basis. And this has accelerated with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the forceful introduction of new ways of working. In fact, 45 percent of global human capital will participate in reskilling processes before 2030, according to a recent study by the consulting firm McKinsey.
The market, the evolution of new ways of working and the transformation in which BBVA is immersed call for the development of new strategic skills that enhance the employability of its professionals. To address this need, BBVA has designed a global reskilling and upskilling experience as part of the bank’s learning model, Campus BBVA. The bank has identified 14 strategic skills for which it is proposing different training itinerary - all in a digital, gamified environment where employees are the protagonists and can decide their own development.
“Today, with greater intensity and fervor than ever before, we are facing a social and economic environment that is constantly changing. The challenge of ensuring the survival of organizations entails adapting and being flexible enough for teams to be able to navigate this uncertainty and constantly incorporate the skills that are needed to promote the strategy,” explains Pilar Concejo, the Global Head of Learning at BBVA. The new learning experience at The Camp “offers employees the opportunity to update and deepen their knowledge of different strategic skills.” For the director, this new proposal “makes it possible to offer dynamic and continuous learning in order to foment employee motivation and engagement, and therefore, their commitment to their development.”
Heading to the top
Every learning itinerary consists of three levels of specialization using an adventurous narrative of a mountain: the valley (basic level), the mountain (intermediate level), and the summit (expert level). At The Camp, the employee’s level is based on their experience. In other words, they start as a hiker. When they have completed all of the valleys they become an explorer. If they climb a mountain they become a mountain climber, and an alpinist when they reach the summit - the greatest level of specialization in the knowledge area. Before accessing a new level, the employee must complete the different learning resources and demonstrate the acquisition of this knowledge. Once the itinerary or expedition has been completed, the employee receives a certificate that guarantees the knowledge they have acquired. Through collaborative learning with other colleagues and experts, The Camp will provide employees a continuous update on the knowledge they acquire.
Furthermore, in the mountain and summit phases, significant learning experiences (SLEs) are incorporated in order to reinforce the knowledge acquired - putting it into practice with an evaluator from the knowledge disciplines who assess what the student has learned.
The Camp, BBVA's reskilling learning experience - BBVA
“Gamification is a very important element at Campus BBVA, and now also at The Camp, as it allows us to design experiences in which employees feel much more identified and increase their level of commitment to the learning process,” Concejo says. “In the end, we try to ensure that the employee is motivated enough to move forward with their development in a continuous and sustainable manner over time,” she adds.
The skills of tomorrow are increasingly present
The project's biggest challenge is to create an experience that allows the professional to incorporate all the knowledge they need. To do so, itineraries were established for 14 skills the bank has identified as strategic to its transformation: sustainability, design, tech, data, cybersecurity, digital sales and marketing, behavioral economics, financial health, computational thinking, leadership, advisory, operations and processes, agile and non-financial risks.
In this regard, Campus BBVA’s learning model has been transforming in recent years in order to anticipate and react to all this demand and evolving needs. “Our employees and their skills are BBVA’s greatest asset - that’s why we foster this culture of learning. We have flipped the center of gravity for our strategy, putting employees at the heart of everything we do. We have made them the true protagonists of their training, creating an entire ecosystem of decentralized training in which employees are the ones who decide what to learn, how and when,” explains the Head of Learning.
In order to make this strategy a reality, BBVA has promoted a culture of continuous learning, constant updating, whose results are already very tangible. In recent years, online learning in the Group has represented an average of 71 percent of total training (78 percent in 2020). Campus BBVA’s platform has a catalog of over 16,000 training options (online courses, massive open online courses, podcasts, videos, blogs and simulators) and successful initiatives have been developed like ‘Ninja Academy’, which boosts technology skills, ‘Tech University’ or ‘Space Career’, which promotes the development of data scientists.