The Future Training of Bankers THE idea of staff training
by individual firms is so new an idea in itself that some consideration of it in connexion with banking is opportune. One of the advantages of joint stock administration is " perpetual succession," but business men are only too keenly alive to the fact that perpetual succession comes more by close application to business than by developments of codes of law.
A regular infusion of blood from outside is frequently of much value to a business, but it indicates to the existing staff that they must look out rather than in for their personal futures, and experience leads one to think that it is often the best men who observe this first.
Since coming to a mutual agreement after the War not to recruit staff one from another, the banks have been committed to providing their own future requirementh from their own ranks. In addition a number of other factors have confronted them.
It is not often realized that more than 8,500 bank clerks laid down their lives in the War, and when to this is added the numbers permanently. incapacitated and those who found other outlets after the War, the dislo- cation which the banks suffered from this single cause becomes apparent. The resultant gap in the flow of candidates coming forward for the senior posts has been a source of much anxiety to most of the managements.
Over and above this the banks have suffered further dislocation from the introduction of machines for book- keeping which forced them to restrict recruiting for some time, as well as presenting them with a variety of other managerial problems. The requirements of the banks fall into three main and fairly well-defined groups. First of all they require large numbers of clerks for clerical duties which, although of a routine nature, nevertheless place them considerably higher than the rank and file of ordinary commercial clerical work. This group finds its technical training at present through the examinations of the Institute of Bankers and the many excellent courses of study which have been erected on the base of these examinations.
Out of the men who qualify in this group emerge gradually those who are choosing themselves for the higher but intermediate executive posts. These men either show outstanding. ability in the handling of practical business, in which case they attain branch managerships, or, by reading theniselves through Uni- versity degrees in Commerce, Law or Economics, reach the higher administrative posts in the various Head Offices. Thus far the problem •of the banks is seen to be capable of being solved, and is in fact being so handled. The more difficult task is to devise a means of training which shall produce the leaders for the top of the tree. The banks are not alone in finding this none too easy a task. It is noteworthy that so many men at the tops of their respective trees—not by any means confined to banking— have produced the divine spark of leadership without any apparent training at all. It is at least open to doubt whether a system of training which could guarantee to produce this result will ever be evolved, but in any case it is not purely a banking problem. On studying the matter we find that there is a rapidly -increasing tendency for industry at large -to seek its leaders from the ranks of • accountancy, the ostensible reason being that an - accountant obtains through his general practice a broad grasp of a variety of businesses and their varying difficulties. Curiously enough banking provides exactly this same training, and it is probably on this account that the banks have not hitherto experi- enced very much difficulty in finding leaders from within their own ranks, feeding on their own fat, as it were.
The exact lines along which training for the future should proceed depends largely on the future of banking itself. There is an increasing tendency towards the planning of industry on a large scale, and if this develops it may become essential for bankers to take a more active part in the guiding of industry than they have done in the past in this country. The banker of the future will thus, in all probability, be required to have a much broader grasp of affairs than has lately been demanded, and if this forecast is correct will need much more than a purely technical banking apprenticeship. Above all else he will need a much closer acquaintance with politics, with which finance is becoming more closely tied up every day.
Swiuning this all up, may fairly say that the present systems of training are providing fairly adequately for current requirements and for those of the immediate future. For the rest, the very nature of the job appears likely -to produce its own training. In any discussion of the 'problem—and that is a point no one realizes better than the bankers themselves—it must not be overlooked that banking itself is subject to change, and the nature of the finally evolved state must needs determine very largely the character of training which will be required, F. J. LEWCOCK,
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