Reskilling is a top priority for many organizations, but making it work effectively and at scale is no small feat. Effectively preparing employees not only for changing technologies and ways of working—but for entirely new careers in your business—feels more like a utopia than reality for most L&D teams.
But that’s exactly what Aviva is doing. To find out how, I recently sat down with Molly Howes and Alex Price from Aviva to learn about the Foundry, the company’s dedicated program to reskill employees for the future.
We discussed the key processes behind large-scale reskilling, the strategies that ensure employees are truly job-ready, and the hurdles of expanding the program internationally. We also examined how Molly’s team secured stakeholder buy-in, and what’s next for the program.
Here are five of the most significant takeaways from this conversation. Listen in full to hear Alex’s impressions of the Foundry program, and where it’s going next.
Listen now: Revisiting Aviva’s Ambitious Digital Reskilling With Molly Howes & Alex Price
A critical need for upskilling and reskilling
Launching a large-scale, ambitious, international skilling program is a serious undertaking. It requires a clear need and the resolve to create major change.
For Aviva, the need to adapt to new digital demands was undeniable. “We could see a talent gap across the organization,” says Molly, “specifically in digital and data skills. We know that with automation and generative AI, roles are going to change and some roles will no longer be needed.”
But the response wouldn’t be major hiring plans or pushing certain employees out. “We want to keep the amazing talent we have at Aviva. So if those roles are no longer there for them, we need to give them the opportunity to reskill, find new skills, and find new passions for the future.”
Aviva’s Foundry program is specifically designed both to upskill employees for their current roles, but also help them move into something entirely new. “We’ve reskilled 200 people into specific areas that were previously a gap for us: business analysis, product ownership, UX design, and software development. We’re incredibly pleased that, of those 200 employees, we’ve redeployed 89 of them. And they’re thriving. People are amazed at the talent coming through the Foundry.”
Highly specific, scalable learning
The skills required to move into a new role can be highly specialized. And so are an organization’s ways of working, culture, and business strategy. Molly’s team needed courses that could welcome cohorts of up to 30 learners and efficiently build new skills.
“We needed our upskilling and reskilling to be focused on our ways of doing things. That gives learners the best chance to hit the ground running and understand the concepts, tools, and techniques they need to thrive in their new role.
“We spent a lot of time in interviews, pulling out techniques and understanding the roles in more depth. We wanted to make sure we weren’t just talking about market standards for a business analyst, for example. We need to talk about Aviva standards for a business analyst.
“And then it’s about bringing it to life for learners. When they get to hear from people actually doing the job at Aviva, that’s when their eyes light up. They understand exactly why they’re learning about a given topic, how we do it, and how it will impact a project.”
Foundry courses are mostly virtual. But learners still get valuable face-to-face time with subject-matter experts. “We give them shadowing opportunities and coaching with people in those roles. And we really encourage mentoring to make sure that people get the external view and can speak to someone in a completely different area of the business to theirs.”
“When they get to hear from people actually doing the job at Aviva, that’s when their eyes light up. They understand exactly why they’re learning about a given topic, how we do it, and how it will impact a project.”
Securing stakeholder buy-in
All L&D practitioners know just how valuable the support of other teams is—and what a struggle it can be to actually get it. Aviva’s remarkable success relies heavily on the buy-in of others—both in knowledge sharing and supporting graduates in their new careers.
So how did they get here? “It was challenging at first. We had to convince them that taking a new team member from the Foundry, who wasn’t experienced and hadn’t been a software engineer before, was the right thing to do.”
The answer lies in a familiar adage: show, don’t tell. “The proof is in the pudding. We had a recipe for success, and were seeing people go into roles and delivering. I’m a firm believer that telling a story or seeing real-life success for yourself is a thousand times more convincing than shouting about data, or how great the syllabus is.
“It’s about bringing real people—real hiring managers who can show what it’s meant for their teams. And real learners who can show what it’s meant for them, too. We had people who could talk about having been a customer support expert for years, now going into software development and thriving. That makes us all feel good. And other people want to get involved too.”
Setting clear goals for skills-based learning
When it was launched, the Foundry team had a clear performance objective: 200 employees reskilled by the program. This goal came straight from the top of the organization.
“We were very fortunate that our CEO was fully supportive of the initiative,” says Molly. “When we came to her in 2022, she believed completely. And she set our performance goal for us.”
This precise focus is one of the absolute keys to success. There’s a big difference between exposing people to content or having them attend an academy, and them actually becoming ready to be hired in a completely different role.
The traditional L&D approach is to provide an experience, connect it with the people who need it, and then leave them to it. But there often isn’t a level of accountability.
The Aviva L&D team actually own their goals. And the results are far more tied to business performance and future success than simple attendance, completion rates, or the number of courses created.
Redeploying learning across continents
Having launched so successfully in the UK and Ireland, the Foundry has more recently rolled out in Canada. But this expansion wasn’t simply a matter of rinsing and repeating in a new country.
“Some of the programs we’re running in the UK didn’t translate perfectly to Canada. So we needed some adaptations to those, making sure we’re working on exactly the skills we need.”
Aviva created specific courses that built the core technical skills needed, but with a local focus. “We launched two bootcamps, each eight weeks long, with four hours of learning per week: Tech-Product and Technical Citizen. Technical Citizen focuses less on software and more on data and languages that could apply across roles. The Tech-Product makes sure we’re not only focused on consumer-facing work, but also how we’re supporting our teams internally, and our intermediaries.”
These highly-specific programs have proven to be among the most successful and impactful yet. “We had the highest ever engagement scores in those bootcamps, including 4.8 out of 5 for Technical Citizen. Now we want to make sure that those 52 colleagues who went through the bootcamps get opportunities for a next step. And we want to support their continued learning. We need to have the right pathways set out for them.”
Aviva’s incredible engagement scores come from an approach built around achieving a clear outcome. Well-defined performance goals let you refine your programs over time, and you become more efficient.
The focus on a specific goal is so important—far more than just providing learning.
That’s just as important for learners as for the organization.
“We had the highest ever engagement scores in those bootcamps. Now we want to make sure that those colleagues who went through the bootcamps get opportunities for a next step. We need to have the right pathways set out for them.”
Listen to our conversation in full: Revisiting Aviva’s Ambitious Digital Reskilling With Molly Howes & Alex Price
About Molly Howes
Molly is Foundry and GenAI Capability Lead at Aviva. She joined Aviva in 2015 and transitioned into roles including Team Leader and Digital Product Owner, before taking on the Project Lead role for the Foundry in 2022.
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