Powering Potential: Fuel Your Team's Career Growth

At ICBA LIVE 2024, ICBA Education launched its Professional Development Planner to support community bankers’ efforts in retaining talent and promoting upskilling.

Featuring more than 80 job descriptions, the tool helps employees explore banking careers, find relevant ICBA Education offerings and develop a personalized professional development plan.

ICBA put this together with the needs of community bankers in mind—and it’s been years in the making.

Starting from scratch

Back in July 2022, the ICBA Education team began brainstorming ways to best support community banks seeking to develop unique training programs for their employees.

“We sat for hours and hours and days in a room with Post-it notes everywhere and started visualizing what this could be,” says Mandy Snyder, VP, online training, products and compliance at ICBA. “There was nobody else that had something like this—no electronic program or web‑based program. And so, we did it from scratch.”

In addition to providing job descriptions and associated levels of responsibility, the tool identifies the competencies, specialized knowledge and on-the-job learning experience an individual is encouraged to have to qualify for a chosen position. It even breaks down these positions by level: associate (entry level), individual contributor (subject matter expert), manager (team leader) and strategic leader (the head tone‑setter of the organization).

The Professional Development Planner was designed to be used year after year, says Snyder. This tool can be used to support hiring efforts, aid in refining job descriptions, identify skill gaps, identify training opportunities for staff and build concrete professional development plans.

Setting bankers up for success

ICBA recommends that community bank leaders delegate a mentor to help staff develop their plans. Choosing mentors is entirely up to the bank, whether it’s a manager, an individual in HR or another role. Mentors can partner with employees to set personal goals, identify deadlines and provide guidance in their professional development.

In addition to the specialized knowledge needed for each core competency in a chosen position, the tool lists suggested attributes for success in each role.

“Some people call them soft skills—we call them power skills,” Snyder says. “And then, once you decide, ‘OK, this job requires you to be this kind of person and know these things,’ here’s the training that ICBA has that can go with that to help you achieve your goals.”

Power skills are areas in which “bankers really need to be proficient in, in order to be successful in this type of a role at this level,” explains Jenny Forschen, education content and compliance specialist at ICBA. These power skills make an individual stronger and more successful in their position.

Full steam ahead

The early response to the Professional Development Planner has been positive. “We’ve gotten a lot of feedback as we’ve shown a lot of banks, like, ‘Wow, that’s really intuitive and user-friendly,’” Forschen says.

The ICBA Education team also made sure to prioritize customization. When a banker is ready to develop a plan, they can export job descriptions from the program to modify or add responsibilities and even include competencies from other job descriptions.

As more community banks dig into the planner, ICBA Education will explore other possibilities for its development. Snyder hints that they will develop more job functions and consider how the tool can be integrated with other systems.