U.S. Bancorp's $600 million investment in Microsoft Azure isn't just going to move 1,300 applications to the cloud. The bank wants to change its culture along the way.
The Minneapolis-based bank is aiming to get its 7,000 technology employees cloud-certified over the next two years, but its training strategy uses a cost-effective concept uncommon among traditional banks: "volunteers."
Madhu Rao, senior vice president and head of enterprise and solutions architecture, designed the program. He said he didn't want U.S. Bank's employees to feel nervous about learning cloud technology. Major cloud providers, like Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, offer certification courses and tests for employees to learn and demonstrate understanding of cloud platforms.
"We wanted to come up with a way to engage the firm so that our employees could commit to continual learning," Rao said. "It was not just to get people certified, but to also build interest. To many in the organization, the cloud was an unknown and this program aims to demystify that and create excitement."
Rao and his enterprise architecture team developed a volunteer-based initiative in which about 30 bank employees who were already certified in Azure would each train cohorts of up to 50 people. Using a blend of volunteer coaches and Microsoft-provided classes, participants spend 70 to 80 hours over the course of six weeks, all during work hours, to get cloud-certified.
Over the course of six months in 2022, 1,200 people completed certification, Rao said, and about 15% of those people completed Azure training beyond the initial foundations-level certification.
The bank wants to double its certifications in 2023, to 3,000. The bank eventually plans to have all of its 7,000 full-time tech employees receive cloud certification.
Peter Pollini, U.S. banking and capital markets leader at PwC, said the mindset across banks has changed to focus more on creating flexibility as financial institutions work to compete with fintechs. He added the idea of using volunteers to help train and certify employees marks a shift in traditional banking culture.
"[Using volunteers to train employees] is very fintech-y," Pollini said. "Teams collaborating together and saying, 'Hey, there's a problem. Let's now shift as a team and figure out how we can solve that problem together.' That's not the way that you would necessarily think of a bank upskilling their talent in the past."
Rao, who previously led cloud and architecture efforts at JPMorgan Chase & Co., said the scale of U.S. Bank's certification endeavor is larger than most banks'.
West Monroe partner Joe Davey said in a December interview that he's seen banks successfully update their decades-old technology when they partner folks who are familiar with older platforms with employees who understand modern systems.
"The training and getting your certifications … I think it's good for banks," Davey said. "That allows them to continue to meet their employees [wherever their tech skill levels are] and give them forward career progression. As technologists, we always need to be refreshing ourselves when we can."
Rao said U.S. Bank has trained all types of technologists, including a mainframe programmer who hadn't had much training or certification since 1998.
Cloud architecture is a major priority for upskilling at U.S. banks as they've ramped up their use of cloud computing, using software or infrastructure hosted by cloud service providers like Microsoft, Google or Amazon. Jason Strle, chief information officer and head of enterprise functions technology at Wells Fargo, said in a November interview that the
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Azure certification isn't currently mandated, but U.S. Bank will require a "common minimum" of training as it moves applications to the cloud. Rao said the bank will begin accelerating its migration soon, at which point it will begin migrating about 1,300 applications to the cloud.
The bank's enterprise architecture team is also developing "certification-as-a-service," in which senior executives can request certification training for their individual teams.
U.S. Bank management has supported the enterprise architecture team throughout the cloud certification initiative. Some, including Vice Chair of Consumer and Retail Banking Tim Welsh, have taken certification training themselves, Rao said.
"What's been good is the commitment of management to say, 'Engaging and educating our employees is important, the continual learning is very important,'" Rao said. "And we have created an ecosystem where we are shopping within our closet to look for people that are already experts, and then we are providing them the opportunity to go and impact people."
Rao said he wants to drive training and certification by making it inspiring, not punitive. U.S. Bank calls its certification training program "Certfest," as a portmanteau of Certification Festival, and publicly recognizes employees who volunteer to teach others. Rao's enterprise architecture team also hosted a hackathon last year, which brought about 65 engineers from the company to partner with Microsoft and produce a product.
"It's not the traditional architecture mentality," Rao said. "We are changing that mentality. We are saying, 'we'll roll up our sleeves, we'll help you learn, we'll help you tangibly test the technology.'"
