Nationwide is one of the UK’s leading banking providers and the only one that is owned by its members, those customers who bank, save or have a mortgage with it.  It has around 18,000 employees with administration centres in Swindon, London, Northampton and Bournemouth, as well as a large branch network. It has recently acquired Virgin Money making it an even stronger force in UK banking.

Nationwide has been using the future skills framework for more than two years. The framework has influenced their learning strategy, in area topics such as Customers, Data and Digital, enabling their employees to pick up key skills the organisation needs now and for the future. It has played a key role in helping them to validate their assumptions about those trending skills, in planning and forecasting, and to develop their assessment and validation processes, as well as building a conversation with business leaders and the whole workforce around the significance of building skills for long-term success.

Nationwide has been working on strategic workforce planning since 2019, but there was a gap in their shared understanding of the most important skills. That was partly because of the way people talked about skills, specifically how they named them. In conversations with business leaders this was most apparent for the behavioural skills. It was key to get a common approach so that employees could log and record their proficiency and development in a consistent way. A taxonomy existed but it needed more work.

The other business need was to measure who in the organisation had which skills – to move to a self-assessment model, rather than leaders assuming that everyone had skills that matched their job title or job code. This shift facilitated skills gaps measurement and was done through their talent marketplace. It gave Nationwide a more granular picture of all the skills they had, including those gained from previous roles outside the business, with the potential for helping with future cross-functional roles. In the HR function alone, this has allowed hires into the team from more diverse parts of the organisation.

Nationwide updated their skills taxonomy (Lightcast) to help colleagues log their skills in the same manner as someone in the external labour market, and then into their talent marketplace provide by Gloat. The implementation of these new systems was an opportunity for the team to communicate their messages to leaders at all levels.  It was up to two years before Nationwide could feel that everyone was speaking the same language of skills, and another couple of years to help their whole workforce embrace the concept of logging their skills and using the tools.

The FSSC Framework was used in addition to the thinking that had already been developed inside the building society and they have drawn on other frameworks too in developing their taxonomy. A key benefit of the work has been the ability to monitor trends in the development of the skills over time, providing rich data on core areas for the organisation’s future skills needs. In recent years, more self-reporting of skill levels in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have been some of the biggest increases within the organisation.

Nationwide like to observe how different skills are tracking across different parts of the business, and how people are describing their skills, or developing different skills within the same job title. They are also able to identify whether completed training is leading to more people adding skills to their profiles and what proficiency levels they are identifying. There are also some key technical skills, such as risk and controls, that are crucial from the regulatory standpoint, that need to be carefully monitored for gaps. The work done on building a framework and systems to track proficiency is increasing awareness of training or recruitment needs in specific areas on an ongoing basis.

Nationwide has adopted three proficiency levels across all their skills – beginner, intermediate and advanced – which ties in with their tools, and is an easy concept to grasp for users. They try to avoid being too prescriptive about which skills are needed for each job title or code, as that can lead to a ‘cookie cutter’ approach to skills development. While there may be a minimum level of skills needed for a role, Nationwide is focused on the broad scope of skills that colleagues have developed beyond their current role’s baseline, which leads to better forecasting and planning. It also allows them to build up a picture of the entire workforce’s DNA, establishing the different skills among the core business units. They have managed to arrive at a 96% picture of the permanent workforce’s skills without having to manually add skills to their job architecture.

This approach helps to fill the gaps that have been identified alongside the future skills that Nationwide needs to focus on. Nationwide then engages colleagues in ‘skill blitzes’. These start with larger sessions which communicate the value of improving skills, ensuring everyone understands why they are important both personally and organisationally. All of these activities culminate in the organisation acquiring the core skills it needs and building a culture of learning.