At Monmouthshire Building Society we live and breathe our values. Our core purpose is to help members, communities, and colleagues to thrive, and we’ve been doing this since we helped our very first member onto the housing ladder way back in 1869.

Our core values have never changed; it’s about community and it’s about doing the right thing. Which is why we’ve launched our new MBS Community Academy, a groundbreaking pilot programme, aimed at creating real career opportunities for people in our communities.

Bringing our values to life

As Head of People at the Society, I’m passionate about community engagement, and understanding and recognising the talent we have in our own back yard. With the Society ‘s support and in my own voluntary time, I sit on two community boards and that’s all about fostering those opportunities and supporting a whole range of diverse people across our home city of Newport and beyond.

Looking at it from that community engagement perspective, it felt like a natural opportunity to think about what else we can do as a Society to kickstart careers in financial services.

The Community Academy 

The new MBS Community Academy will offer six paid entry-level placements across the Society for a duration of 12 months, providing candidates with the necessary skills and knowledge to kickstart their careers within financial services.

The academy will be open to anyone aged over sixteen, with no upper age limit. The Society have also removed any requirement to have a minimum of five GCSEs to apply and will support potential applicants all the way through the process. At the end of the placement candidates will have the opportunity to apply for any permanent roles available at the Society.

Changing the face of financial services

We’re committed to building a thriving workforce that is representative of our communities. However, we often find it hard to reach and connect with the talent we know is out there. 

The Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation (WIMD) identified a total of 23 Lower layer Super Output Areas (LSOA’s) within Newport which ranked in the top 10% most deprived areas in Wales. Newport is also the most ethnically diverse area of Gwent, with 10.09% of residents from a non-white background, and 13% of households are identified as workless households.*

The two metrics we’re looking at, which we’d like to shift the dial on, are recruiting applicants from under-represented groups and high poverty/low income households, as we recognise, they don’t have these opportunities often. 

But people in our communities have told us they don’t feel financial services is for people like them, they don’t have the qualifications needed to apply, or that the application process is too complicated. And I think when we look at our pipeline of talent that comes in, we just don’t reach that diverse community. So what is the barrier around it? Is it the way we are positioning the adverts, the expectations of the roles or something else?

We’ve listened to the feedback  and this scheme is all about stripping back both those real and perceived barriers and tackling those challenges head on. Recruitment will be based on values, behaviours and aptitudes aligned to the Society’s core purpose, rather than specific qualifications and experience. So, it’s about us offering experiences within the Society, helping people develop their skills and paving their way into the sector.

We’re working with groups and organisations who have similar passions and determination and can open the door into those communities, enabling us to have a greater reach.

Future talent

The MBS Community Academy will offer 12 month placements with some formal learning alongside. At the end of the placement we’ll assess the vacancies we hold and hopefully we’ll be able to offer them the opportunity for a permanent role. But it’s about kickstarting their careers and opening the door on financial services, which as we all recognise, has traditionally been a male, white collar workforce.

This is about working with our members and communities, as well as challenging ourselves. If we want to be a more modern mutual, and encourage under-represented groups to work with us, we must start somewhere.

We must change the dial and move forward. If people feel represented, understand that we understand them, and we can work together, think how powerful that can be. It’s about that richness of working together, that diversity of thought, of changing culture and building a brighter modern mutual. If you can bring all of that together, it becomes an inclusive, thriving culture. We can’t wait to see where it takes us.

More information about the MBS Community Academy can be found on the Society’s website 

* Newport Community Wellbeing Profile 2021