ANZ runs cloud boot camp to train 2000 staff remotely

ANZ Banking Group put over 2000 staff through a week-long cloud boot camp that it ran virtually with the aim of getting as many as possible AWS certified.

The ‘get certified in a week’ program was run by ANZ’s enterprise cloud portfolio team within Group Technology.

“Our idea came when reflecting on a highly successful, small cloud study group which we ran in January,” cloud computing manager - consulting Ian Butler said in a LinkedIn post.

“The idea was simple: what if we could run the same study group, but for 1000 people, remotely and get as many of them cloud certified - in under a week?”

Butler said it took the bank three days to get the virtual training scheme up and running.

“Instantly the program was oversubscribed, with over 1100 staff interested to join the first week we had to quickly schedule another,” he said.

“The results were over 2000 staff attending a week long cloud boot camp, with many of them officially cloud certified a week later.”

In a separate blog post, ANZ transformation communications lead Katy Harding said that due to changes owing to COVID-19, “many workers were in a position where their normal work and access was reduced”, with the bank looking to utilise that time to upskill staff.

“The program prepared participants to sit the AWS Associate Cloud Practitioner exam in just one week, requiring around 16 hours of contact and study,” Harding said.

“ANZ offered to pay for both a practice and final exam, if certain attendance and employment conditions were met.”

Harding said the program ran completely “off-network”.

“People joined the webinars from personal devices, ‘mobile’ and accessible channels, notably Yammer and email, were used,” she said.

Butler said the bank “used statistics and surveys (including Net Promoter Score (NPS)) to help measure engagement” with the online learning content and format.

Staff were also able to catch up on training sessions.

“You need to think about how people are working remotely,” Butler said.

“Staff might have children home from work, vulnerable family members needing care and partners home from work. 

“A critical success factor was ensuring that staff could self-service content via a micro site (quickly built & deployed to AWS S3) and watch webinar recordings to catch up.”

For those that participated, Harding said that “nearly 1400 practise exam vouchers and nearly 300 final exam vouchers have been issued while more than 100 people have been certified.” 

“Participants were mostly from Australia, India, New Zealand, China, Singapore and The Philippines but also PNG, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Harding added that AWS “believes this is the largest simultaneous AWS cloud training event, nine times larger than any live training group they’ve had before.”