Advans Myanmar: a 3-year training and staff development programme sponsored by Norfund

A young institution with great potential

Advans Myanmar, Advans group’s youngest greenfield, has had a rapid development in the almost 5 years since its start of operations, and is now reaching the significant size of 350+ employees. Norfund has loyally been supporting it since the beginning. The Norwegian Investment Fund for developing countries is indeed a shareholder of Advans Myanmar and has been supporting the institution since its creation in 2017 notably funding almost entirely the technical support for the MFI in its first years of existence.

In 2021, thanks to Norfund’s renewed support with a grant of 139,000 Eur Advans Myanmar has been able to launch a Capacity Development Program for its staff over a period of 3 years. The training programme will help secure a pipeline of matured local managers to nurture regional expansion and ensure Advans Myanmar’s continuous growth. Having founded Advans Myanmar, together with Advans SA and Amret, Norfund naturally chose to continue accompanying it with this ambitious training programme.

Staff Training and Local Excellence: At the heart of Advans’ HR value system

Advans believes in the strength of local staff to deliver growing service quality and client satisfaction, which are strong pillars of its overall client-centric strategy. Advans is therefore determined to develop, retain, and promote local talents in Myanmar, where staff seniority already hits an average of 2.5 years after just 5 years of existence.

Beyond skills and capacity development, Advans Myanmar will also use this program to boost staff motivation, which is critical in the current challenging political and socio-economic context. The program has therefore also been designed to reinforce the sense of belonging to the institution, and the desire to stay there longer.

“Thanks to the training programme, I have started a CIA Part 1 Course which is one of the biggest steps I can take to advance my audit career.” Swe Swe Hlaing, Internal Auditor

An ambitious plan for training and creating a solid talent pool

The Capacity Development Programme consists in specialised technical as well as functional classes targeting Head Office (HO) and Field managers. The program includes physical but also digital classes thanks to the implementation of a Learning Management System, whose deployment started this month with the installation and configuration of the interface. 

“Thanks to Norfund’s financial support, our organization will be able to strengthen its human resource capacities. This is a great opportunity for local talents to sharpen their skills.” Seinn Mar Lar, Senior Training and Development Officer

The programme sets ambitious goals with 24 technical classes, from risk management, IT capacity and security, to digitalisation of financial services, to be attended by HO Technical Officers and Heads of Departments. It also includes 130 functional classes for field management and high potential staff: English, MS Excel, data analysis, and management. Furthermore, the Learning management system will offer the freedom to access training without constraints, anytime and anywhere, ever more important in today’s post-Covid period.

A growing digital catalogue of courses

The new digital learning management system is to deliver secure and agile training remotely to a growing population of staff in a fast-changing environment. At the end of the programme’s period all courses, even those completed physically, will be made available on Advans’ learning management system (LMS). LMS deployment was officially launched in Myanmar beginning of March 2022 with its technical configuration, the training of Advans Training Centre (ATC) in the use of the tool, and the loading of the first training sessions into the system.  Staff can thus already access 3 online courses on the platform while a total of 7 training modules will be made available in the coming months.

LMS is a group programme, which has already been successfully deployed in Tunisia, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire in 2020. It was key for Advans for it to be deployed to the remaining subsidiaries of the group starting with Advans Myanmar as soon as possible. It is thus an important milestone that is about to be reached!