CAREER PURSUIT 2021

CAREER PURSUIT 53 BARCLAYS By Helen Massy As one of themain sponsors of Career Pursuit, Barclays has been pivotal to the magazine coming to life. However, they have been involved with supporting the military community for overadecade. Inthisarticle, I explore the initiatives Barclays has in place to give back and support the men, women, and families who have dedicated their lives to military service. B arclays made a formal pledge to support our Servicemen and women in 2013 when it signed the Armed Forces Covenant (AFC). This followed on from its initial pledge of £1 million in 2010 to support wounded injured and sick (WIS) personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan through employability grants with Service charity delivery partners. This commitment has not changed, and Barclays has committed a further £2 million in grants since, with nearly 2,000 WIS and vulnerable veterans benefitting. In addition to the grants programme, it has a CV and interview workshop scheme to support WIS veterans through theMOD’s personnel recovery centres. As part of its AFC commitment, Barclays decided there was more they could do to support this unique customer base. It’s all well and good helping someone write a CV, but if their debit card gets blocked for suspected fraudulent activity in a PX (an American military-run store) in Afghanistan, that’s not providing the best service. So, Barclays started by putting an Armed Forces marker on customer accounts and providing free telephone access to call Barclays when deployed overseas. These small but impactful changes were just the beginning. That has since grown, with a whole host of offerings, including Armed Forces-dedicated branches, better access to credit and loans, financial education, the Forces ‘Help to Buy’ scheme, and incorporating veteran-owned businesses into its Global Supplier Diversity strategy. Kevin Gartside, Head of Military & Veterans Outreach at Barclays, discusses that: “Veterans bring an incredible array of skills to any workplace – leadership, commitment, diversity of thought, agility, adaptability, integrity, experience – and they have been adding huge value to our business for a decade now, making Barclays a better organisation. We have hired over 600 [veterans] right across the business in that time, and they are a high-performing, dedicated colleague group who are valued very highly at all levels. We have now opened our programmes to military spouses and partners, as we recognise them as another high- quality talent pipeline. So, we are expecting to see even more value added with their diversity of thought and wide range of skills in the coming years.” However, Barclays didn’t stop there. It recognised that not all veterans want to work for a bank, so it set up the Veterans' Employment Transition Support (VETS) programme to help all veterans – regardless of rank, Service, or circumstance – find the right job. VETS is now the UK’s single biggest veteran support programme. Over 6,000 veterans benefit from the support of thousands of mentors and over 180 partner organisations that want to support veterans into positive employment outcomes.