Businesses that work hard to develop the skills and working environments of their staff should be able to avoid the worst effects of the skills gap. “Our organisation has not been affected significantly by the skills gap or the skills shortage,” says Kevin Hogarth, human resources director at Capital One Bank (Europe).

Capital One is a diversified financial services company with customers in the US, the UK and Canada. It has more than $146bn in managed loans and 50m worldwide customers, serviced by 32,000 employees, with 4m customers and 2,400 employees in the UK.

Managing skills starts with the company’s annual strategic planning process that sets its marketplace objectives. These drive a set of business priorities for skills that are needed to enhance the organisation’s capability. Development and recruitment plans are then drawn up to deliver them.

“We have a bias towards developing skills internally,” says Mr Hogarth. “If there is an immediate need for these skills, depending on the state of the market, it may be quicker to hire than to build the skills of our existing employees.”

The company’s focus is very much on learning, loosely deploying a wide range of techniques on an individual basis. “There is a broad set of organisational training and development priorities,” says Mr Hogarth. “There are some that the vast majority of our employees will go through in the year, but the rest are focused on giving experience to an individual, giving them more responsibility, getting their manager to coach them in a particular area or giving them an online development programme.”

Capital One University is an internal resource for job-specific learning available through an intranet portal. It is structured around colleges for each discipline, such as credit risk management, finance and process management. Material includes details of traditional training programmes, third party materials, such as information from Harvard Business School, physical learning materials in the company’s resource centre and suggestions for experiential learning.

Most individual learning is managed through a regular dialogue between the manager and employee about their learning needs. Formal development plans are online and the resources of the intranet and Capital One University help to match a particular learning need to a specific learning solution.

A lot of this programme is designed to be done at the employee’s pace – at a time of their choosing – so they have a great deal of discretion about how they do it. It is expected that some will do the training in their spare time and others will do it during their working day.

Although most effort is directed at skills, Capital One supports training for external professional qualifications, too. Formal classroom training programmes are a relatively small part of the overall investment in learning.

“We are not very interested in government schemes,” says Mr Hogarth. “The business world is moving too fast for the state sector to respond quickly enough in delivering the new skills. They have to get people to a basic level, but beyond that it is for employers to develop those skills.”

Development means being willing to move people around the organisation laterally to give them different experiences. It also means allowing them to broaden their existing jobs by taking on additional responsibilities to get more experience and demonstrate their ability to operate at more senior levels.

“Stretch” opportunities allow high potential individuals to take on a bigger job for a period of time from somebody who is seconded to a project or away on maternity leave.

“They can taste what it is like,” explains Mr Hogarth. “We give them coaching and feedback and it is often a springboard to a more senior role in the fullness of time. Although we have a very performance-related culture, we recognise that people learn through their mistakes, so we are supportive.”

Mr Hogarth continues that in order for employees to give the discretionary effort that is a feature of high performing organisations, they need to be engaged, committed to the vision of the organisation and see a connection with their individual contribution. They also must feel that their contribution is recognised and financially rewarded and that it will lead to an opportunity to develop their careers.

There are not enough senior positions to meet the aspirations of every employee, so the company recognises that some development costs will be spent on employees who move outside the organisation.

However, Mr Hogarth believes that the company receives an overall return on its investment through discretionary effort, recommendations to potential new employees, lower levels of attrition and higher levels of productivity.

“We are now in a world that is about learning, not training,” he concludes, “with the learner’s needs at the centre. Organisations also need to be very clear about the link between their business strategy and their learning needs.”