Anna Collins, Senior Digital Eagles Leader tells us how Barclays’ work to equip colleagues, customers and the public with Essential Digital Skills is establishing it as a leader in this space.
“Barclays has understood for some time the need to become a digital first bank. Alongside that is a desire to ensure colleagues and customers aren’t left behind.
“Back in 2013, we learnt that although colleagues had the latest technology to support customers, they didn’t necessarily feel they had the skills or confidence needed to make the most of it.
“That was the impetus for Barclays Digital Eagles.”
“This programme of work was all about finding out what our colleagues’ concerns were and what would help them build up their digital capability and confidence.”
“Since then, our programme has expanded and evolved into what it is today, with an extensive suite of colleague programmes and customer support. We have a bespoke platform called Digital Immersion that helps colleagues equip themselves with Essential Digital Skills as well as pursuing further skills such as coding and programming.
“This wasn’t the end of our digital skills journey. As an industry leader, we also started to think about the bigger picture. About how we could use what we’d learnt internally to help our customers and other members of society become confident with Essential Digital Skills too.
“This led to the creation of our free external online platform, Digital Wings, in 2017. Here, you can find bitesize learning modules to boost digital skills and confidence. We also offer a tailored version of Digital Wings for organisations to help them provide digital skills to their workforce.
“In 2020, Digital Wings had an upgrade to align our learning to the Essential Digital Skills Framework. FutureDotNow played a huge part in this, and work hard to ensure the framework is shared far and wide to help people move forward in the digital world.”
“FutureDotNow’s support has been invaluable. It’s been a really great collaboration.”
“Having a national framework which spans every organisation is important, as it means that we can remove the various interpretations of what basic digital skills are and enable collaboration.
Our journey to date has placed Barclays firmly as a leader in the digital skills space. It’s also led to our customers benefiting from more efficient journeys because our colleagues are far more equipped to deal with digital queries.”
What’s your advice to others?
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Focus on developing skills and confidence, rather than giving people technology, because they won’t necessarily use it.
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Select digital champions who have gone on a journey, rather than people who were already digitally confident.
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Recognise everyone will have different levels of digital capability and confidence, and that people in senior positions will not necessarily have the most advanced skills.
How has FutureDotNow supported you?
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Educated Barclays about the Essential Digital Skills Framework, leading to improvements to our external Digital Wings platform.
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Introduced Barclays to organisations that have gone on to benefit from tailored versions of our Digital Wings platform.
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Helped Barclays think differently about working with and supporting other organisations, leading to more productive partnerships.
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Provided Barclays with speaking opportunities that have helped us showcase our learnings and increase brand reputation.
Trailblazer is just one of the training models used by FutureDotNow coalition members to digitally upskill the workforce. To see a breakdown of other models and hear from the companies that use them, click below.