In an effort to step up its digital transformation and innovation strategy, Standard Bank has signed an agreement with the international Digital Skills Academy.
The agreement, the third local partner agreement signed with Digital Skills Academy aims to deliver training, digital product development and provide industry experience to the academy's international BSc programme participants in SA.
Digital Skills Academy says the European university's accredited one-year International BSc Degree programme in Digital Skills incorporates industry engagement with leading organisations such as Standard Bank.
Candidates that have been identified as emerging talent will be nominated for this programme in order to offer them the opportunity to work on real-world projects within the bank and to produce industry-optimised graduates.
Fanie van Heerden, head of IT solutions, architecture and design at Standard Bank, says: "The digital revolution and other changes in customer behaviour have dramatically accelerated the pace of change.
"The bank is moving into this digital realm quite fast, Digital Skills Academy participants will be exposed to a lot of innovative thinking tools and techniques."
He adds this partnership will support Standard Bank's transition to a more digital approach that will focus on digital projects using the wealth of data available and to create greater customer intimacy that makes the customer feel like a segment of one.
"Candidates will benefit from a multi-disciplinary approach to learning that gives them the opportunity to address the real, practical challenges we have in industry. At the same time, we expect our own staff to have an opportunity to upskill as they collaborate with the team from Digital Skills Academy," says Van Heerden.
He points out SA is faced with skills shortages in the areas of DevOps, cloud-based solutions, next generation infrastructure, and in areas of the mobile space.
Van Heerden reveals the company is constantly seeking new skills as they roll out new functionality across its corporate banking, retail banking, insurance and finance services in the 19 African countries in which they operate.
"We simply don't have enough developers working on either the front end or the back end. The partnership with Digital Skills Academy could potentially help to provide us with resources to fill those gaps," he explains.
In order to accelerate their digital transformation strategy, he says Standard Bank is investing in initiatives focusing on client experience, lean and Agile development, innovation and big data.
He adds the organisation is also engaging with higher education to bring digitalisation into the university curriculums and their research activities.
Jovanka Damjanovic, head of engineering improvement at Standard Bank, says: "We believe the partnership will offer mutual benefits.
"Digital Skills Academy participants will benefit by connecting the theory to the practical implementation, with our transformational journey towards lean, Agile and DevOps, the participants will be exposed to a new way of thinking. At the same time, we are very aware that we cannot scale or move forward without creating more IT capabilities in South Africa."
She adds by supporting this initiative, the bank hopes to help close the skills gap and support digital transformation.
Paul Dunne, CEO and founder of Digital Skills Academy, says the Industry Partner Agreement with Standard Bank follows the agreement signed recently with KPMG SA and MTN Group.
"These partnerships illustrate our desire to work alongside globally recognised corporate brands to offer relevant, cutting-edge industry skills development and experience as part of our internationally acclaimed training programmes, including ordinary BSc degrees and honours BSc degrees," he says.
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