Barclays was driven by a recognition that a knowledgeable and confident workforce would be better equipped to help educate and support their customers to do the same. As a first step, the Digital Eagles were born – local champions within Barclays tasked with advocating digital skills within the workforce. According to Steve, ‘Digital Eagles were established to reach out to customers and colleagues and educate them as experts in all things digital’.

However it was clear that a more sustainable method of training was required in order to reach all colleagues in need. ‘One of the challenges was really the scope – we have 20,000 frontline colleagues who all need some sort of level of upskilling. So we created a programme called Digital Wings for colleagues to upskill and do so in their own time’, Steve said.

Digital Wings is a tailored, City & Guilds accredited online learning course, teaching colleagues new competencies around digitisation and the internet. The training is constantly evaluated and updated to reflect changing skills needs and to future proof the programme.  Most recently, this has meant the development of new modules on cyber security and even coding.  

Take up amongst colleagues has been extensive and continues to grow. There are currently 18,000 Digital Eagles and 55,000 learners within Barclays, which means that just over a third of the whole UK workforce is currently signed up to the Digital Wings online course.

With the initiative an obvious success internally, in 2015, Barclays launched it externally to share best practice amongst other businesses and the public. On expanding the programme, Steve said ‘Externally it’s always been seen as a shared growth initiative as part of our citizenship agenda = hearing back from customers first hand, they were also looking for something like this’.

With the training addressing everything from keeping safe online to providing general digital awareness, the content was not necessarily Barclays specific and could therefore be used to support thousands of people with improving their digital skills.  The programme has been particularly valuable to small businesses. ‘We work with other organisations with a similar need to upskill their colleagues but don’t necessarily have the resources or know how to set something up like this,’ said Steve. ‘So we have made it completely adoptable by other organisations’.

Today 180 organisations and approximately 45,000 external users are using this training in some shape or form, across all sectors from large corporates, to charities and the public sector. ‘We have recently white labelled as well which means we are allowing them to have their own branded platform so it really resonates within their own local organisation’ said Steve.