OCBC’s head of learning on the outlook for 2019

Yap Aye Wee, OCBC Bank’s Head of Learning & Development, OCBC Campus, chats exclusively with HRM Magazine Asia about the outlook for learning and development in 2019.

Yap heads up the OCBC Campus, which is the only corporate city campus in Singapore. There, her team are tasked with nurturing an organisation of lifelong learners.

What are your learning and development priorities for 2019?  

My priorities for 2019 are the same as they have been for the last 3 years – to continually drive alignment of learning and development initiatives to business outcomes as well as to create a vibrant learning culture.

We have been on this journey for some years, and I personally find the evolution quite fascinating. Such goals are not easily achieved  in the short term, and we also want to ensure that what we build is sustainable, so we try as far as possible to ensure that each new initiative builds on previous ones.

Ironically, in a disruptive world, I find that having clarity on goals and staying focused on that is quite important. “Focus on goal, but flex on approach”.

Thanks to disruption, the very nature of work is changing. How do HR leaders need to take this into account, in the context of building learning and development agendas for their workforce?

The nature of work has been changing for quite some years now. Consequently, the nature of skills required has also changed.

Add to that the fact that global and demographic trends are changing the nature of the workforce, and you have a constantly shifting landscape within which learning and development must effectively operate.

In my view, HR leaders need to bring the learning and development agenda to the fore with its focus on skills, roles and most importantly culture.

In my talk, I will share some of the work we have started in aligning L&D to workforce transformation.

What skills do you think learning and development professionals themselves need to focus on nurturing, in this era of disruption?

Learning and development professionals need to be agile and comfortable with ambiguity because the environment is fluid.

They need to be assertive and technically strong because they now need to lead a critical piece of the people agenda.

And finally they need to be literate in the use of relevant technology and data because these are enablers to their work.

You’ll be speaking at HR Festival Asia later this year. Could you tell us more about what your session with cover? 

I will talk about how the traditional learning and development approach can no longer keep pace with disruption.

OCBC Campus does not claim to have all the answers to what that right approach might be, but we have experimented with some ideas.

I will be sharing some of our initiatives, the reasons behind them, and the outcomes we achieved – both successful and not.