Lloyds Banking Group is putting £100 million behind a bet that the skills gap opening up around AI will hit young workers first. The bank announced it will reskill 20,000 of its own colleagues, including 67,000 in AI and future-ready capabilities more broadly, while expanding an ambition to support 600,000 young people across the U.K. by 2030, on top of 400,000 already reached over the past five years.
The investment funds apprenticeships, graduate programs, work experience placements, careers education and branch-based placements aimed specifically at 18 to 24 year olds who are not currently in education, employment or training. Youth hubs inside Lloyds offices will add work-readiness training and financial literacy support to the mix.
“Businesses have an important role in helping people develop skills and confidence to succeed,” said Sharon Doherty, Chief People and Places Officer at Lloyds Banking Group. “Through apprenticeships and work experience, we want to help create more pathways into work for young people.” Pat McFadden, the U.K.’s Work and Pensions Secretary, called the investment “a fantastic example of businesses stepping up so young people across the UK can build the skills and experience needed to get on in life.”
The original insight is in the split target: Lloyds is training its own workforce for AI at the same time it is trying to build a pipeline of young talent for jobs that AI is actively reshaping, which only works if the skills it teaches externally match what it is teaching internally. That is the same alignment problem employers more broadly have struggled to solve, training workers for today’s tools rather than the jobs AI is about to create. It also lands against a U.K. labor backdrop where entry-level and part-time work is already under legal and structural pressure, raising the stakes on whether large employers can make good on pipeline commitments at this scale.
Source: Lloyds Banking Group
