When I engaged alongside industry leaders like Olumide Sholanke, Funso Tooki, Oluwaferanmi Owolabi and Emeka Dibia at the FITC Nigeria #3Es conference on “Digital Transformation and the Workplace: Equipping workforce for success” earlier today; it was with a humble appreciation for the great company I work for – Africa Prudential Plc under the leadership of our visionary CEO Obong Idiong.
We have audacious dreams and a lot of steps to get there but I celebrate progress. I celebrate seeing colleagues cross from prior roles as Customer Service Representatives to Product Managers, Data Analysts; Executive Support to Scrum Masters, etc; I celebrate the joy from watching colleagues who have primarily worked in the Capital Market all their career take on the leadership of Product Development teams, run stand-up meetings, engage developers on the product backlog; I celebrate call center representatives who have evolved into Customer Success Managers while also breaking down big data into actionable insights with ease; I celebrate us going from a circa 5% core technology workforce to 53% as at 2022 with some of this growth coming from staff who chose to explore new career paths within the company.
It was not random. The organization under the leadership of the CEO invested in accelerating learning. From KSS sessions with industry leaders and CEOs whose mistakes and journeys we learned from; to organization wide learning sessions on #Agile, #Scrum, #DesignThinking, #Innovation, among others; to paid enterprise learning subscriptions to give colleagues access to on-demand practical learning; to creating room for staff to explore career paths outside their domain area – we have systematically and with the collaboration of our employees made this happen!
Today, we have expanded this to include a #tech #academy i-Academy.org currently training a pioneer cohort of 30 people, at no cost to them and under the leadership of a Director of Programs who was previously the Chief Experience Officer at AP (amazing career pivot 😎)
Like all the panelists mentioned in today’s session; transformation journeys are ultimately about #People. With a clear vision of your aspirations, a roadmap to success, key metrics to evaluate progress on this journey and a strong/fluid plan for embedding your employees and other key stakeholders; it is only a matter of time before the results start rolling in!
I trust that those who joined the session today found value in the conversations we held; I know I did.
Our FY22 result highlights are available on our social media pages for more information on our journey.
PS – Thankful to have also experienced personal transformation while at AP. From Core HR to vast learnings in tech operations through exposure to, and tasks in products, software development, strategy, sales, customer experience/success and so much more.
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