Safaricom - 2020 Sustainable Business Report

75 INTRODUCTION OUR BUSINESS OUR MATERIAL TOPICS OUR STAKEHOLDERS CONCLUDING REMARKS Skills training and career development Training FY20 FY19 FY18 FY17 Investment in staff training (KSh million) 273 310 298.7 298.7 Percentage of staff attending training 81% 83% 83% 79% The decrease in training spend during the year reflects our intentional transition to e-learning via the Safaricom Business School and Digital Academy. The cost of delivering e-learning is substantially lower than traditional classroom-based learning. The shift has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and we anticipate that e-learning will account for at least 10 per cent of our budget going forward. Likewise, the percentage of employees that attended training was expected to decrease as we cut back on classroom- based learning and shifted perceptions from seeing training as something that we undertake ‘away from our desks’ to part of our daily job. Safaricom Business School As part of our transition to e-learning, we launched the Safaricom Business School in October 2019. The robust learning platform hosts over 10 000 digital courses from five different vendors. During the year, 85 per cent of distributed licences were activated, with 68 per cent of courses completed and an average of 15 learning hours per employee delivered. The learners who achieved the most training hours, received recognition from their line managers. In FY21, we aim to achieve a licence activation of 90 per cent, and an average of 40 learning hours per employee delivered. Building a resilient workforce through Safaricom Digital Academy The Digital Academy enables employees to reskill and learn the digital skills we have prioritised as part of our transformation to being the digital services provider of choice. We increased the number of employees participating in the Academy from 60 in FY19 to 100 this year, and plan to expand this to 500 employees in FY21. Twenty-three per cent of the employees in the current cohort are from our commercial and support teams. All 60 employees from the FY19 cohort have transitioned to digital roles within the company to encourage the application of the skills learnt and career growth. Discover graduate management programme Our Discover programme is a graduate management trainee programme that enables greater talent mobility within the business and supports our drive to make Safaricom increasingly global by accelerating the development of our talent pool. The 18-month programme incorporates rotations within and across functions in an accelerated learning environment to build depth and breadth of experience, and is designed to prepare future leaders to assume challenging responsibilities and roles. The professional development and growth of trainees in terms of becoming functional experts in different areas, such as cyber security and data science, is measured throughout the programme. Each year we hire 20 graduates, split 50:50 by gender. We currently have 73 Discover trainees.