RBA refreshes career paths for its technology team

The Reserve Bank of Australia is in the process of refreshing its training and development framework, mapping career paths and progression that it hopes will help it attract and retain skilled technology staff.

CIO Stephen Smith told the iTnews Podcast that the bank is working with an “external partner” to refresh the framework.

“That framework gives our staff the ability to plan out their career, undertake a diagnostic of the knowledge areas that they need to build skills and experience in, and also for them to flag to us those areas where they would like to have secondments and rotations to really embed and cement some of those skills,” Smith said.

So far, through the refresh effort, the RBA has created 23 “job family” groupings, home to “four or five” job roles, each of which “has three-to-four career stages.”

“We're going through the process of identifying for each one of those job families and jobs, what's the training and accreditation that people will need at each career stage, and we're curating it and making it available,” Smith said.

Smith said the RBA is using a 70-20-10 model as the basis for skills development.

“To acquire capabilities and skills, about 10 percent of it is formal learning, 20 percent is supervised on-the-job experience and 70 percent is less closely supervised embedding experience,” he said.

“So we're looking not only for the formal training, but also to give our people the opportunities to apply that training and practice in a way that allows them to safely embed those skills.”

His present focus is on finding ways to allow staff to consistently carve out time for career development.

By Smith’s own admission, RBA’s technology staff of 550 is “quite lean”, considering the bank’s critical central role in the economy and “the importance of the work that we're doing”.

“When you think of the Reserve Bank, and the fact that it runs the payments settlement system for the nation, that it runs the domestic market operations and liquidity operations for the banks, that it looks after note printing and note issue, the IT shop is actually quite lean and quite focused,” he said.

“It's a team that really relies on some deep expertise and some really highly motivated, engaged people to keep all those systems running effectively.”

Keeping staff motivated and challenged is at the top of Smith’s priority list, and he sees the refreshed training and development framework as being core to RBA’s response.

“I'm excited about getting this training and development framework up and running really effectively,” he said.

“The ability to make sure that our people who are already really highly engaged with the purpose of the bank, also have an opportunity to develop the skills and capabilities that we need and they need in the future, is exciting and can really enhance our overall employee value proposition.”

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