Standard Bank leverages its relationship with Amazon Web Services with the launch of the AWS Skills Guild

This will have a significant impact on our ability to innovate, offer new value propositions, and play a meaningful role in customers experiences. Click here to read more about this journey. 

The AWS Skills Guild supports Standard Bank’s ongoing commitment to ensure its employees are equipped with the necessary skills to thrive in a digital world, remain competitive and support Africa’s growth. The offering also underpins Standard Bank’s strategy to move seventy percent of its core applications to the public cloud by the end of 2025. 

In pursuit of this objective, Standard Bank has set itself a target of having 1,000 employees complete the foundational training and gain certification within six months of the launch. A further target has been set to achieve 500 role-based certifications across Standard Bank within six to eight months of the launch. To date, 576 practitioners, 106 associates, five professionals and ten specialty certifications have been completed.

Increasing cloud skills amongst its employees will have a significant impact on Standard Bank’s ability to innovate, offer new value propositions, and play a meaningful role in customers experiences.

“To achieve our 2025 ambition of being a digitally enabled, customer-centric platform business, our people are learning to think and act differently. With the support of AWS, we are empowering our people with technology skills to drive digital transformation through cloud adoption, and to ultimately provide a seamless customer experience through our future ready platform business,” said Jorg Fischer, Chief Technology and Operations Officer at Standard Bank Group].

The expanded relationship between AWS and Standard Bank represents a key milestone in Standard Bank’s journey towards upskilling its employees by making cloud learning a priority for targeted groups and individuals, enhancing technical competency within the technology teams, and promoting cloud fluency across the wider Standard Bank Group.

“Cloud adoption enables growth, scale, and innovation with increased agility, it also drives a culture shift impacting departments across an organisation. It creates a culture where employees can speak the common language of the cloud which can lead to radical transformation. Skilled employees will have the confidence to innovate faster, experiment more, turn customer needs into technical solutions, and drive broad-scale digital transformation across the Standard Bank Group,” said Maureen Lonergan, Vice President, AWS Training and Certification.

Standard Bank is committed to growing and developing its employees to their full potential, investing over R770 million for this purpose in 2021 alone. This significant investment in learning solutions has made a remarkable contribution to employee engagement indices across Standard Bank, and highly favourable ratings (>85%) in terms of employee perceptions regarding growth and development opportunities, collected through Standard Bank’s annual employee engagement survey. 

Standard Bank aspires to be a truly digital as well as a truly human organisation, serving its customers’ predominantly online, processing in the cloud, and embracing open innovation and partnerships. While focused on skills development, Standard Bank is conscious of the importance of leveraging these strategic relationships that will enable continuous learning and strengthen Standard Bank’s platform ambitions.