Encouraging our staff to become future leaders of the Society

At Progressive Building Society we want our staff to strive for excellence by encouraging them to invest time in training and development to enhance both their personal and professional growth. We are therefore committed to understanding the career aspirations and development needs of our staff and we endeavour to cultivate and develop our employees in the ever evolving and fast paced financial services industry.

Recently, our third cohort of staff have achieved their ILM Level 3 Certificate in Leadership and Management which is a great achievement, and which has already opened doors for promotion and department changes amongst the participating staff. We encourage non-managerial staff to gain the qualification in Leadership and Management as it creates a pool of skilled talent within the Society who are ready to take on new challenges and act as supporters and enablers of innovation and change.

As one of the first organisations to sign up to the NI Gender Diversity Charter Mark, we have made a commitment to focus on providing opportunities that promote individual growth and development for both our male and female staff. We ensure that we offer equal opportunities in areas such as such as training and volunteering, and internal advancement.  The Society signed HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter, pledging to have at least 50% female participation in the ILM programme, and this has been achieved.  According to the Financial Times, in 2018 women were 23.7% of those employed as Chief Executives and Senior Officials. At Progressive we want this number to rise even further by ensuring our female employees have the opportunity to progress to such roles. 67% of our Senior Management Committee comprises women, and 37.5% of our Board of Directors.

In total 29 members of staff have achieved the ILM qualification in Leadership and Management. We are incredibly proud of every one of them for making the commitment to achieve this goal and we hope that even more staff will be influenced by this success to further their personal and professional development.