Risk and rewards of taking part in the Ascend talent programme

Supporting our people with their learning is one of the key ways we champion their potential.

One of our most popular initiatives is the Ascend talent programme for risk professionals. It’s a fast-paced, year-long programme designed to help highly-motivated colleagues fast track their careers within NatWest Group.

We spoke to Ailsa Armour, a Nominated Office Oversight Manager in Financial Crime, and one of our ‘alumni’ from the 2020 Ascend programme.

Ailsa has been with us since 2018, and with a background and a Master’s degree in Global Security, she feels she’s in the perfect role. Ailsa discussed how the Ascend programme helped her in her role and opened up big new opportunities.

Forward thinking and future facing

‘I started Ascend in February 2020. It ran for a year and we graduated officially in February 2021. It was a development programme that initially started in Restructuring, and then widened out across Risk. And it's been running for 10 years now, I think. And the cohort, the year that I was involved in, there were 11 of us from across Risk. Myself from Financial Crime, there was Restructuring, Credit Risk, and colleagues from Risk Modelling and Data Analytics.’

Ailsa was excited that her priorities were so closely aligned with the organisation’s, as one of the projects she worked on in the programme was climate change. ' The whole programme was very forward-thinking and future-facing with climate change. We were set a brief by the Risk Executive Committee to create a suite of climate resources that would help broaden and embed climate change understanding across the Risk function. The 11 of us all collaborated on the project. First of all, identifying the various stakeholders, examining the existing knowledge and learning materials on climate, then coming up with some new ideas. We created and went forward with three ideas, which we presented in February to the Risk Executive Committee. 

'One of the ideas I was involved in was scenario-based learning about climate change set 10 years in the future. It’s about getting people thinking about climate change now and what steps we can take to stop things getting worse. It’s exciting work, getting people engaged.’ 

Nurturing big ideas

Ailsa is thrilled that the project she and her team worked on will be going live and could be rolled out across the whole of NatWest Group. ‘So we've done our pilot, and we are currently waiting for Learning & Development to build it on the internal systems. Provisionally, it's going into Risk. But we have presented to different committees and locations. And it has had really positive reactions with the group.

‘Climate change is at the top of everyone’s agenda. And other parts of the business have asked us if we can roll it out to them as well. So what we've said is, you know, we've done our pilot, it was successful. We're going to roll out to Risk first, because that was the brief, but our hope is that it will be rolled out across the bank. So everybody in the bank has the opportunity to gain from it.’

‘Online learning was a complete positive.’

Ailsa and her 2020 cohorts were the first group to complete the course remotely. We asked her how she found it. 'Initially, I thought we should just pause the programme and come back together when we can all do it in person. But looking back, I think we would have missed an amazing opportunity. It also feels there's an aspect of our learning, online, that was again, future-proofing us. Because it means that we all did a large project fully remote and online, which was brilliant. Which is how a lot of us are working these days anyway.

‘So the online learning was a complete positive. Doing the Ascend course was great, and the project we worked on, climate, has amazing relevance to us all. And is only going to grow with more and more importance, I think, especially in Risk.’