KUALA LUMPUR (May 7): Malayan Banking Bhd (Maybank) will spend RM30 million this year to implement a digital upskilling programme aimed at increasing its employees' digital literacy and equipping them with capabilities that will ensure their relevance now and in the future.

Dubbed FutureReady, the training programme is mandatory for all employees and is part of Maybank's continuous commitment to humanising people development and enabling them to meet customers' needs more effectively in the fast-changing digital world.

"We recognise that jobs within the banking industry are changing rapidly in the current environment and we need to prepare our employees to be agile and adaptable to new tasks that may need different skill-sets," Maybank Group president and CEO Datuk Abdul Farid Alias said in a statement yesterday.

The training programme is anchored on six key areas of skills namely digital awareness, data-driven decision making, human-centred design, agililty, future communication, and risk and governance in the digital world.

Abdul Farid said the programme is developed to future-proof employees digitally to support the bank's aspiration to be the 'Digital Bank of Choice'.

"Technology is rapidly changing the way we do business today and the future, and it is important that our employees are kept abreast of new developments," he added.

Under the programme, employees are empowered to take charge of their growth, undergo weekly learning modules and participate in uniquely created FutureReady Lab sessions to put their learnings into action.

"We are also training our managers to facilitate the FutureReady skills learning in their respective teams because employees need to be encouraged and given the opportunities to experiment and apply the learnings to practice," said Abdul Farid.

The FutureReady upskilling programme provides employees with the opportunity to also be certified in new skills areas such as computer programming, data analytics and data science, human centred design, and agile methodologies. They will also be able to experiment with these skills to create innovation.

Maybank group chief human capital officer Nora Manaf said as at end-March, 91% of Maybank employees across Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines have been assessed on their levels of digital literacy, and over 20,000 employees underwent the foundational e-learnings.

In addition, 800 managers have been trained on how to conduct FutureReady Lab sessions to immediately enable further internalisation and application of learnings.

"These managers have conducted FutureReady Lab sessions for over 3,100 employees," said Nora.

She said the bank had in the last year, also developed a variety of innovative programmes such as the 'Maybank Immersion Program' which enabled employees to have a six-month internship with various start-ups and Fintech companies to understand how technology is being used in different ways.

"We have also developed a Digital Payments simulation called the 'Go Disrupt Challenge' and the 'Maybank Go Ahead Transform' programme which enable employees from all levels to experience new ways of working and learning," she added. "Essentially, all these programmes were designed to make learning new digital skills fun, self-initiating and accessible for all employees."