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By J Solomon
WHILE e-learning has become common these days, especially among working adults, the danger for NUBE members who spend a couple of hours or less on each module is the expectation by the banks that they become immediate experts in the fields covered.
When there’s a snafu, they are held responsible — or, more deplorably, thrown under the bus by higher-ranking officers and managers who are paid a lot more to take such risks.
The logic of putting people through sophisticated learning programmes they barely understand from the point of language or technicality — and doing it electronically without an instructor to answer their questions — is partly so that banks can forgo the cost of hotels, food, per diem, overtime and specialist trainers typically incurred with trainings like these.
The lunacy of this whole thing is that banks are passing it off as a modern-day solution for skill building, when the reality is something else.
With what they’re doing, the banks are not achieving any reskilling or upskilling, but rather down skilling. The workers gain nothing and, worse, become vulnerable to disciplinary action when something goes wrong.
Banks are increasingly determined to pass the buck to their workers when something goes wrong, evident from the show-cause letters issued by certain banks to those who refused to participate in e-learning programmes on NUBE’s advice.
The union has asked the banks concerned to retract the show cause notices and enter into dialogue with it to craft a more suitable form of training versus the unproductive e-learning regime.
As for NUBE members being forced into e-learning at other banks, NUBE’s advice is the same: Don’t do it. The union has two reasons for saying this. The first is the risks involved for the staff. The other is the ineffectiveness of the whole learning, which it says should be conducted in person rather than through a computer screen.
Among the litany of injustices done to banking workers over the decades, e-learning is one of the gravest, as it was turned from an empowerment tool for workers into a weapon that could be used against them anytime.
To understand how e-learning became the existential threat it is today to NUBE members, a little history is needed, going back to the Covid-19 era.
A cheap pandemic solution that now victimises bank workers
Prior to the Covid-19 era, banks spent actual money upgrading workers’ skills. Some have owned training centres outside the capital for years, in places like Bangi and Kajang, where company sports and recreational activities are also held.
A typical training session at these centres used to last three to five days, incurring accommodation cost for the attendees (at a hotel if the bank does not have its own rooms), expenditure for catered meals and fuel claims for staff who had driven there.
There’s also overtime pay for those doing longer hours to cover the work of colleagues who are away at the training.
Not to be forgotten is the fee of the trainer, which can be a substantial part of the cost, especially if it is someone with deep experience and overseas references.
Banks used to prize such professionals to give their training sessions more respectability, even handing out prec-course notes and other material with credentials of the trainers to impress those attending.
With the pandemic though, everything changed. The lockdown and subsequent months of safety protocols discouraged classroom study everywhere. Virtual learning became the global option and Malaysian banks quickly pounced on that.
Now, with Covid-19 over, in-person learning is being preferred again, especially by those who appreciate the advantages of interaction and networking within a classroom to better grasp what’s taught.
But the 17-member banks of the Malayan Commercial Banks Association aren’t reversing course and are diving deeper instead into e-learning.
One reason for this is that virtual learning allows MCBA members to do away with the logistical headache of managing staff movements throughout the year just for the sake of training.
E-learning is also a perfect cover for lazy HR executives not to do more.
The other is the zero cost advantage banks have beyond creating the e-learning module, which can be accessed from the workplace anytime.
Staff who need to complete the programmw are then pressured by electronic reminders automatically set up by HR.
No rooms, no meals, no per diem, no overtime — and, certainly, no trainer — required.
Since the pandemic ended, the largest banks in Malaysia have been making outsized profits and it’s not surprising, considering how much they’re saving in legitimate staff-related expenses.
But there’s another side to the coin that’s perplexing. And that is Bank Negara requires banks to commit a mandatory 2.5% equivalent of staff wages to training.
On top of that, the Human Resources Development Fund stipulates that banks contribute another 1% to this.
Together, that's an allocation of 3.5% equal to wages that's mandated to training. One wonders what banks are doing with all the cash they have set aside, and why they can't do a better job with their training.
NUBE’s only answer to this: A lack of sincerity on the part of banking employers.
Banks just don’t care about the welfare of their lowest-level workers. These are the people slogging each day to keep the banking floor running. They need to learn skills in an effective and timely way.
Yet, banks insist on having e-learning, which is a broken process where both the language and medium of instruction — 100% by computer and in English — does not fit the profile of the average bank worker in Malaysia.
NUBE’s 15,000-strong membership consists primarily of Malay-speaking bank workers typically not fluent in English.
Complex English use
The English used in the e-learning modules at Malaysian banks can, meanwhile, be complex, depending on the subject matter in banking. For the average NUBE members who are predominantly Malay speaking, understanding phrases and jargon in a language that’s not their own is already a challenge, what more applying them without mistake.
NUBE’s membership, largely made up of B40 and M40 individuals, comprises tellers, bank clerks, non-clerical workers and ‘special grade’ clerical workers — who form a crucial layer beneath the executives at the banks.
Besides acting as tellers, the ‘special grade’ clerical workers also attend to all customer queries on the banking floor.
In a typical e-learning situation, a special grade worker gets early notification of the deadline for the course that is to be completed. But due to other responsibilities, the worker puts the programme aside to prioritise customer service.
From the employee’s stance, such prioritising makes sense: There’s no overtime pay for anyone staying beyond regular work hours to do e-learning.
Thus, such learning must be completed during the regular day. And even if overtime is allowed, the question arises whether it’s even productive to conduct such training after a long work day.
Also, banks give excuses citing intellectual property and privacy concerns in making training modules only accessible from office desktops, meaning the e-learning cannot be completed on an out-of-network computer at home.
The crunch often comes for the employee on the deadline day of the program. Racing through other chores, the worker tries to find time to make the delivery.
At this point, the inclination would be to skip the guidance pages of the learning and go straight to the questions. Often, the answers would have to be picked from multiple choices.
The system will tell if you picked the wrong answer, but it will also allow you enough opportunities to get it right, say those familiar with the process.
To expedite matters, they say, officers at some banks will share answers in advance with those assigned to the e-learning, reinforcing the notion that completion of the programme is more important than understanding it.
At the completion, the participant is usually asked to electronically sign an undertaking that “I have understood what I have learned”.
Here’s where the problem begins for the employee.
“It’s not a problem until it becomes a problem”
The whole e-learning process at banks has been turned into such a robotic process that NUBE members are blinded to its dangers.
Firstly, there is no opportunity to ask any question in the course of the learning; the programme runs the course, it doesn’t teach.
Simply put, it’s not a problem until it becomes a problem. That problem arises when you allow, say, a transaction involving laundered money because you didn’t really absorb the e-learning steps to circumvent that.
The bank’s reaction would be that you had completed the required training and you are at fault. Now, the whole thing has become your problem.
The e-learning issue at banks is part of the larger crisis involving artificial intelligence, or AI, that’s being used to decimate jobs across industry without emotion or consideration to human welfare.
Since most AI-powered tasks need some level of human involvement to be accomplished, the middle-of-the-road solution would be to reskill and upskill people to make them relevant to today’s technology.
But this isn’t happening because many employers conduct training merely to show evidence to relevant authorities that they have such programs in place.
Their training modules are typically in cookie-cutter style, with the primary intent being to placate the powers-that-be rather than promoting skilling in the workplace. – March 29, 2025
J Solomon is the general secretary of the National Union of Bank Employees (NUBE)