OCBC plans to hire 1,500 tech workers, the majority of whom will be based in Singapore
On Friday (March 25), OCBC announced its intention to hire roughly 1,500 IT workers over the next three years in order to speed its digital transformation.
The company anticipates that this project will add value to clients and improve their user experience.
OCBC Bank’s Group Chief Operating Officer Lim Khiang Tong says that the new jobs will include application developers, cyber security experts, blockchain specialists, and data scientists, as well as other people, like data scientists.
Most of these jobs will be in Singapore, but the rest will be spread out across the company’s international operations in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
This news comes at a time when there is a global shortage of tech skills. The banking conglomerate, which has operations in East and Southeast Asia, is hiring quickly as the competition for tech talent heats up.
Existing employees were retrained in digital capabilities
During the last five years, the bank has spent more money on training and development for tech workers. Some bank employees are also being retrained or moved around.
According to Lim, the bank began the OCBC Future Smart Programme in 2018 with a S$20 million investment to train and enhance the digital capabilities of its workers, making it the largest-scale and most ambitious digital transformation program by a Singapore bank.
The Data Certification Pathway, which is approved by the Institute of Banking and Finance and provides in-depth training for personnel in data analytics, is one of these programs. The Cyber Certification Pathway is another program that offers cybersecurity training. Since then, more than 200 employees have completed both paths.
OCBC is also utilizing a new e-learning platform to keep its IT staff up-to-date on new software development, cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) skills.
These, according to the bank, help employees learn about things that aren’t what they were hired for and have been good for keeping them around for a long time.
OCBC also said that it wants to help build Singapore’s talent pipeline, having hired 20 third-year students from Ngee Ann Polytechnic for a one-year internship and setting up a postgraduate AI fellowship three years ago, among other things.
