UOB wins big for exemplary workforce transformation initiatives at Asian Experience Awards

It expanded the Professional Conversion Programme to train over 1,000 employees in Singapore

With the impact of technological advancements and digitalisation on the financial sector, UOB transformed the roles of its customer-facing employees in 2017 from transactional tasks to a multi-skilled scope of work covering areas such as business leadership, financial advisory and digital banking.

To equip its employees with the relevant skillsets that will set them up for sustainable success in their careers, UOB launched its three-year Professional Conversion Programme (PCP) in November 2017. The programme was developed in collaboration with Workforce Singapore, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and The Institute of Banking and Finance to train all its frontline staff. 

In 2020, UOB extended the programme beyond just customer-facing staff to ensure that all their employees are well prepared to succeed in the digital age.

Another 165 of its non-branch colleagues were enrolled in PCP, bringing the total number to over 1,000 people. Almost 90 per cent of the staff have completed the PCP, many of whom have since taken on redefined roles, especially among frontline staff.

The main objective of the PCP is to re-skill and empower the workforce with relevant tools to be ready for work in a digital world. The PCP was designed to encourage learning agility and build up digital confidence to help participants embrace technological change through a learning journey that can last between three to twelve months.

For UOB’s PCP, the Bank received the “Singapore Employee Experience of the Year - Financial Services” award in the recently concluded Asian Excellence Awards. The Asia Excellence Awards is an award-giving body that recognises the ingenious initiatives of creative companies delivering meaningful brand experiences to their stakeholders in all industries in Asia.

PCP’s learning framework is developed especially for the workforce. The first level sets out to understand people and their core competencies, and the second level ensures that the employees are future and digital-ready.

This framework is made up of four areas of focus and proficiency: Domain Knowledge, Future Enabled, Leadership, and Ecosystem. Included in the measures of success for PCP is the redeployment of colleagues to take on other and bigger roles and internal mobility.

PCP is unique because the focus is more on experiential training than studying theories. As part of UOB’s PCP, the Bank designed specific learning journeys where they could work on real business cases. 

Since graduating from the PCP, UOB employees have taken the learnings from the programme, such as human-centred design thinking, to drive innovation in customer experience. Many have also taken on new future-relevant roles that have been created to provide a more holistic branch customer experience, such as Total Service Managers and Digital Champions. These initiatives have enabled UOB to enhance the customer experience and to drive employee engagement, as seen from its improved Net Promoter Scores and Employee Engagement Survey Score over the past four years.