CBA defies skills shortage, targets 1000 more techies

“We also managed to bring in some absolute top talent from tech companies and from both across Australia and internationally … I would say that if you look across all the different areas like engineering, data science and cyber, we’re probably looking at a goal of about 1000 over the next 12 months.”

Ms Adams said the pace of hiring within CBA’s tech operations could not slow down, and it was now onboarding about 110 engineers a month.

She said the bank had recently raised its remuneration rates after benchmarking the market and seeing that tech salaries were rising far quicker than for other job roles. However, she said pay packages were not the primary concern of workers once they reached a certain level.

Non-financial rewards

“It’s definitely more competitive than it was a couple of years ago,” Ms Adams said. “We do track our attrition rates, and they have been rising since what was pretty much an all-time low during COVID.

“But we are doing well and, without underplaying the importance of remuneration, it is because of the flexibility, the fact we are really open to hybrid working, the nature and the purpose of the work, and the substantive amount of reskilling we invest in around skills like cloud, data and analytics.”

Mr Hopper said CBA had made itself an attractive proposition for those with tech skills by promoting its forward-thinking approach to systems investment over many years.

However, he said it had also increasingly sought to give its staff the autonomy and independence associated with the Silicon Valley giants and tech start-ups it competes with for talent.

In a competitive skills market including the country’s hottest start-ups and tech firms, he and Ms Adams said top tech talent would be put off if they ran things like a stuffy old institution.

Be like Google

This desire to work like Silicon Valley firms has included taking the authority for making decisions about how to work away from project managers and professional co-ordinators and putting it into the hands of the engineers who are building systems.

He said this had helped CBA to target a significant Australian expat contingency in the US and elsewhere and lure them home without them feeling like they were taking a backward career step.

“There is a war for talent globally, and largely we are trying to attract talent to Australia before we are trying to attract them to CBA,” Mr Hopper said.

“The whole industry globally is shifting back from an enterprise IT management approach to a ‘bottom up’ structure led by engineering and data, and [by reflecting this] we have differentiated ourselves in the market with a bunch of people we have repatriated from overseas to Australia.”

Mr Hopper said CBA had copied an influential “20 per cent time” rule from Google whereby employees, in addition to their regular projects, are expected to spend 20 per cent of their time working on what they think will most benefit the company.

“My favourite example recently was that, on the back of the bushfires, a bunch of our data scientists and data engineers took it upon themselves to build a system that integrates all of the feeds from various weather platforms like the Bureau of Meteorology and make an engine that predicts weather events,” he said.

“Management didn’t tell them to do that – they did it independently – and then when we started to have extreme weather with the floods recently, they took it to their bosses and gave them a way to start offering customers the help they may need from their bank in advance, knowing that their area was about to be subject to flooding.”

Election plans

The topic of addressing the skills shortage has arisen as the country heads into a federal election campaign, with Labor pledging to spend on education initiatives and members of the tech sector nominating it as their key election issue.

Concerns have been raised, however, about an apparent unwillingness from both sides of politics to address the need for easier and increased immigration.

Reports on Friday quoted Labor immigration spokeswoman Kristina Keneally as pledging to reduce short-term immigration in favour of increased permanent migration.

Mr Hopper said he had not been paying close enough attention to political news to have a view on respective party policies, but CBA’s planning was based more around increasing its Australian geographic footprint than significant overseas hiring.

Traditionally, the bank’s tech operations have been Sydney-centric, but it has now allowed much greater flexibility in terms of office attendance and opened tech hubs around the country.

It is expanding its Melbourne tech hub to accommodate 350 staff, has opened a tech hub in Brisbane to service staff from surrounding areas and will be putting CBA tech staff in with Bankwest staff in Perth.

‘Engineering engineers’

Furthering the theme of working more like tech firms than a bank, Mr Hopper said he was now focused on hiring more “engineering engineers”. In fact, he took to LinkedIn last week to encourage suitable people to get in touch with him directly and said he had already received about 250 CVs.

He said the term “engineering engineers” was something that had been developed in tech companies over the past 15 years and involved employing experts whose sole job was to make the jobs of other engineers better.

“I’ve got a dedicated team, and we’re growing that by about 130 in Australia … They will be building the tools and the pipelines and the equipment that other engineers use,” Mr Hopper said.

“Tech companies like Microsoft have somewhere between three and 5000 people dedicated to that at all times. It’s something that tech companies are very good at, but that many conventional industries haven’t adopted at the same scale.

“The amount of productivity you can get from a high-performing engineer who knows what they’re doing, and who’s fully empowered with the right technology, tools and processes, is not like twice as effective as someone else with the wrong tool, They are 50 times as effective, and so that is why we are making that investment.”

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