Learning and development - Corporate Responsibility

Learning and development

ANZ has a long-held commitment to developing its employees. We develop them for success in their role; for an enduring sense of service to our customers; and for skills that will enhance their ability to relate to others inside and outside the work environment, including leadership skills.

We back up this commitment with significant financial investment.

We believe that responsibility for development sits first with employees themselves. We encourage staff to understand their own strengths and development areas, to have honest conversations with their managers around development opportunities, and to seek out opportunities to learn.

Each employee's line manager is responsible for having regular conversations with them, encouraging them to reflect on what they have done well and what could be done better, and helping them identify opportunities to improve their performance even further.

Finally, the HR and Learning functions within ANZ are responsible for ensuring the right learning is available for staff to perform in their roles, to understand and meet our customers' needs, and to achieve the bank's strategic plan.

Learning and Development Opportunities

At ANZ learning comes in many forms, including:

on-the-job experiences
peer coaching
coaching and development discussions with managers
secondment and project opportunities
formal learning including online and face-to-face facilitation

As an organisation, we examine each individual learning need and consider which of these options might achieve the best balance between the needs of the learner, the timeframes in which skills are needed, the geographic spread of our people, and the depth of technical skill transfer or change management we are seeking.

Each year there are a number of key initiatives we seek to develop and implement to meet the learning needs of our people. These fall into four key areas:

Learning for Leadership and Talent: helping leaders grow the skills they need to lead our organisation forward, and inspire and motivate others
Core Banking Skills: developing the specific technical skills our people need to meet our customers' needs
Organisational Culture and Values: the ANZ values underpinning our interactions, the culture we seek to grow, and the benefits of diversity
Learning Infrastructure: ensuring ANZ globally has systems in place so that the right learning reaches the right people at the right time, for the right cost

At ANZ we work with a wide range of partners to ensure the learning we offer is international in scope, incorporates leading edge thinking about learning and its effective transfer, and is globally available.

Our people are our greatest resource; we are committed to developing them for success.

Progress in 2008

ANZ invested almost $60 million in learning and development in the past year, which equated to an average of 16 hours of learning per full-time equivalent employee. Our learning investment included around 590,000 courses completed through E-train, our online learning platform.

ANZ Training and development measurements

eTrain online courses	2008	2007	2006
Active learners	48,835	30,377	28,700
Number of courses completed	589,925	325,766	306,000

Development investment	2008	2007	2006
LEAN and six sigma methodology	$2m	$2m
Cost savings	$68.8m	$26m
Learning spend	$59.8m	$62.6m	$48.9m

The future

Our focus over the next year will be to ensure that our employees are fully trained in our new Group Wide Code of Conduct and Ethics. We are also aiming to introduce a separate Group-wide ethics program and ensure that it is completed by 100% of our senior executives globally during 2009.