HSBC won the ISE Award for Best Apprenticeship 2024. Emerging Talent Development Lead, Laura Anderson, explains their approach to programme design.
Our strategic approach to apprenticeships at HSBC has helped address some critical skills gaps whilst cultivating a skilled and diverse workforce and fostering a culture of innovation and growth.
Apprenticeships are a key enabler for us to increase productivity and organisational competitiveness, promote social mobility and inclusivity, and boost innovation and agility.
Designing an apprenticeship to meet your strategy
When designing an apprenticeship programme, it is important to establish your aims, purpose, and outcomes from the outset. Be critically clear on the purpose of having an apprenticeship programme and ensure you design it with the strategy of the business in mind.
The work apprentices do should be a real-world experience contributing to your strategic goals so at HSBC we ensure our placements offer this whilst enabling apprentices to have the off-the-job learning time they need to demonstrate evidence of their knowledge, skills and behaviours against the apprenticeship standards.
HSBC degree apprentices are supported to develop key skills year-on-year, recognised with stepped progression and incentivisation over the four years.
Learning begins before apprentices start
To give everyone the best start, the apprenticeship development experience starts from attraction and pre-boarding.
By focusing on work readiness skills, we support the transition into the professional working environment through investing in psychometric assessments for everyone and providing flexible learning options. This is particularly important when hiring diverse talent.
Key elements you will find on our programme include:
- Support for apprentices moving away from home and transitioning into work.
- ‘Journey Runway’ – builds social connections and development 12-weeks pre-joining with sessions on being inspired, prepared, supported and developed.
- First 90-days and induction content focus on practical skills and knowledge for a professional start e.g. learning power skills and tackling imposter syndrome.
Building a holistic apprenticeship programme
Don’t assume the apprenticeship standard is all the development that apprentices need, integration into your wider early talent strategy is key.
We have a development framework which is agile and iterative, so we’re always innovating using feedback and looking ahead to future trends and skills requirements.
The current development runway builds each year and utilises our internal learning experience platform to align to the wider skills agenda of HSBC.
We compliment this with a digital and data literacy programme from year two, integration with the wider Early Careers Community and Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), and the opportunity for mentoring and coaching on an individual or group basis. External opportunities, such as Zero Gravity Career Mentoring and the King’s Trust Million Makers entrepreneurial fundraising challenge, also provide further stretch opportunities in a real-world context.
After end-point-assessment all apprentices join our ConnectUs alumni network for ongoing development, networking, and progression opportunities. This critically connects with wider talent programmes, such as our International Manager proposition.
Business endorsement and manager support
Emerging talent teams cannot work in isolation. The biggest contributor to our success metrics can be attributed to the managers who support them.
We walk-the-talk with many Placement Managers and Sponsors also completing an apprenticeship, which builds credibility.
The team at HSBC has found maximising internal knowledge has got us so far. We have increasingly found the ISE Apprenticeships Resources such as the ISE’s Line Manager Guide to Apprenticeships particularly helpful.
A lot of time is invested in upskilling managers in how to get the best out of their apprentices and support their progress in their learning and skills application.
We leverage existing HSBC-wide training for all managers and complement this with regular group manager check-in discussions and programme specific briefings and workshops.
Our recent bespoke workshop, ‘Mental toughness in a multi-generational world,’ was co-created with our Mindfulness ERG. It brought to life the common triggers of stress in early careers individuals and taught managers how to normalise wellbeing conversations (even the awkward ones).
Using data
Data can be useful to inform programme decisions and also tell the story of how successful your programme is. Over the last two years we’ve implemented 30+ programme changes to better the apprentice experience.
From robust data identification and analysis, we know 100% of our apprenticeship alumni secure roles in the organisation to date, evidencing a strong skill-build and role suitability. This enables a quicker speed to competency and reduced attrition.
Apprentice feedback scores are above the HSBC average, so we know our programme improves employee engagement. There is a strong sentiment that apprentices are able to achieve their career objectives, can be themselves at work and that managers support their career development.
If you’ve not got a robust measurement map in place, we recommend the ISE Apprenticeships Working Group ROI Toolkit as a good starting point for building your data sources.