Content:
Learning in large companies is often irrelevant, boring and yet compulsory.
To change this, Klaus Woeste founded ATTAIN. ATTAIN consists of a team of learning experts and bank managers and offers learning programs for banks. Customer feedback has been excellent.
Why the banking industry is digitizing faster than the automotive industry
Like the automotive industry, the banking industry has gone through various upheavals. What can we learn from the banking industry?
Klaus, what is your dream car?
There is a racing version of the Porsche 356, the Carrera 2 2000GS, which has a 2-liter engine with four camshafts on four cylinders. That’s a special car, only a few hundred of them were built. That’s my dream car.
The path to entrepreneurship: innovation, purpose, impact
Why did you become an entrepreneur?
Klaus Woeste: I can boil it down to 3 words: Innovation, Purpose, Impact.
Like you, I worked in corporate for 20 years. And we realized time and again: If you really want to have an impact in your job, if you really want to do something meaningful, then it’s hard to find that in corporate.
You have to adapt to the company’s goals and fully support them. If you want real innovation, this is often difficult. Because innovation is driven by individuality, flexibility and agility, which corporates are not. If you want to have an impact in the modern world, it’s also difficult.
That’s why I became an entrepreneur. Innovation, purpose, impact.
Learning in transition: Why traditional training no longer works
You’ve been in banking for 20 years. What are the key differences between the automotive industry and banking?
There are differences, but also a lot in common.
The first big difference is that banking is up to 99% white collar, and in automotive the music is in production and development, where physical products are created.
The main difference to cars is the banking product that everyone knows and everyone has. But nobody really has a positive emotional relationship with their bank. Nobody says: “Wow, great, I’ve got this new current account and it’s so cool. I go online every day.”
With the car, you have an emotional product. That makes a huge difference to the corporate cultures and the people you find in these industries
But there are many similarities.
For both industries, the fact is that neither industry has actually been undergoing a constant transformation process for 5 or 10 years. And you read a lot about how the move to electrified cars is changing the entire industry, supply chain, development, sales, etc.
It should not be forgotten that the banking industry has already been through this.
They have largely switched from a physical business model to a digital business model. Here in the UK, 200 stores are closed every year. That is just as challenging as the move to electrification. So both industries are going through an incredible transformation; in the products they offer, how they offer them, how they interact with their customers and so on.
In this respect, the two industries are actually very comparable, although I would say that the financial industry as a whole has made the step towards digitalization of the non-physical product and non-physical interaction with customers more quickly.
What does this mean for learning?
Business processes and business models have changed fundamentally in banking. And they are also changing fundamentally in Auto. As a result, the role requirements are changing completely. The structure, the composition, the composition of skills and how they are distributed among the different roles in the company are changing fundamentally.
For example, there is no longer a branch manager, because there are no more branches. This used to be an extremely important role and he has a whole range of skills. That was a business manager. But you no longer need these skills today.
But today you have many more skills in the area of digital product development, etc. But certain skills and roles are gone forever. You no longer need them.
Two things in particular are fundamentally different for learning in transformation.
You used to define a role, for example Branch Manager. You had that for the next 20 years. And then you could train them incrementally for 20 years to change something from time to time. Sometimes there was a new system for lending or a new system for sales. But the role was the same.
Firstly, roles change and the changes within a role are much greater. And that brings us to this principle of “life-long learning”. That’s clear, but there’s something completely different behind it.
Because I need a completely different learning function, a talent function in the company that is much more agile, that works much more proactively with the business and proactively recognizes and then implements these fundamental skills changes together with the business.
It therefore needs to be much faster and more flexible in its horizon scanning strategy.
The next generation coming into the company now learns very differently. They no longer sit in school for an hour and listen to the teacher. They are told something for five minutes and try it out straight away.
And we see that in our game, in our product.
We get fantastic feedback for our product. 97% of all people who use our products think it’s better than their current training. But when we play this with Generation Z, graduates who are under 25, then we really have 100% satisfaction. 100% satisfaction means 100% want more. We’ve never had that before. They have a different approach to how they want to learn.
And if you bring the two together, this much faster change in skills and roles and these changes in how we learn and why we learn, then you have something to do.
The future of learning: what companies need to change
We’ve already talked about the product, which is different. What do you do differently at ATTAIN, what do you do?
Basically, in my 20 years in the corporate world, I have come to realize that.
Due to economic and organizational constraints, the design process often begins with: How many people do we need to train? How much money do we have? How much time do we have?
But people don’t learn like that. People don’t learn because there’s something that only costs 50 pounds. It takes half an hour and 10,000 others do it. People learn because they are curious, because they want to be better, because they want to develop a skill. And people learn in completely different ways. They learn by trying things out: Give them a set of Lego bricks to put together. If it doesn’t work, they put it back together again. People learn exponentially, learn by playing, people learn by interacting with others.
Attain has taken these principles as its guiding principle. Every learning experience we create is built on 5 principles
Purpose, Social, Application, Variety und Fun.
We simply believe that people learn much better, more effectively, faster and also with each other and collectively much better when these learning principles are applied.
How will we learn in 10 years’ time?
If I knew that, I’d be a billionaire (laughs).
People like me can’t predict how we will learn in 10 years’ time. Generation Z will tell us that. We will be driven. Those entering the workforce now will determine how we learn and educate ourselves in 10 years’ time.
They will show us how they want to learn.
What CEOs should do now
If you were writing a letter to the CEOs of the car industry, what message would you give them?
Klaus Woeste: The collective capacity for innovation and the collective capacity for change of the employees in these companies is much greater than the management boards and executives believe.
I would recommend to boards and managers that they simply put a lot more money and a lot more focus on how they really use this collective power of innovation and change. Simply with the power of the incredible human capital that we have in Europe, because of infinitely many different cultures and infinitely different capabilities. We have all this in Europe in a greater diversity than you even have in the USA or Asia.
I believe we simply need to work better together and really unleash the creativity and change levers.
