Job Summary

The Associate Director, People Capability (UAE National) serves as a pivotal leader within Standard Chartered's creative and delivery teams, providing expert guidance, mentorship, and hands-on support to a talented group of practitioners primarily located in regional hubs. This role involves nurturing professional growth and maximizing the impact of individuals within agile squads, ensuring alignment with the bank's broader learning and development goals.

Key responsibilities include integrating contemporary storytelling and immersive experiences into design practices to enrich the visual and educational quality of the bank's learning offerings. The roleholder champions the continuous enhancement of standards, methodologies, and operational processes within the discipline, fostering innovation and excellence.

The Associate Director holds a significant role in supporting regulatory learning initiatives related to Emiratisation in the UAE, working closely with regulatory bodies, educational institutions, and internal stakeholders to ensure compliance, readiness for audits, and alignment with government requirements.

Through collaborative partnership with Hub Leads and Tribal Heads, they play an instrumental role in ensuring that learning programs meet both local regulatory expectations and global standards, driving consistency and quality across teams and geographies.

Key Responsibilities

• Maintain an up-to-date understanding of the Group’s evolving business strategy to ensure People Capability initiatives directly support overarching goals.
• Collaborate with leadership teams to translate strategic priorities into effective learning and development interventions.

• Develop comprehensive awareness of the banking industry's dynamic economic and market environment, enabling proactive adjustment of learning designs to align with business demands.
• Lead the end-to-end design and delivery of innovative global learning programs tailored to local and regional needs, engaging with business functions to identify capability gaps.
• Enforce rigorous governance frameworks and quality assurance standards to maintain high discipline standards across all learning initiatives.
• Act as an advocate for the Creative and Delivery Discipline, fostering community engagement, pride, and a purpose-driven culture among practitioners.
• Facilitate cross-hive and squad collaboration to share best practices, insights, and innovative approaches, building a robust knowledge-sharing ecosystem.
• Empower and inspire Discipline practitioners through coaching and mentoring, cultivating an environment that embraces new ideas and emerging trends.
• Introduce and embed external thought leadership, creative storytelling methods, and innovative learning technologies to enhance practitioner competencies.
• Support regulatory compliance learning including Emiratisation requirements, partnering with external stakeholders to strengthen professional networks.

Skills and Experience

• Proven expertise in learning design and development principles, with a strong track record of delivering impactful educational interventions.
• Experience managing agile projects and driving iterative development cycles within dynamic environments.
• Proficiency in design prototyping and experimental techniques to rapidly validate and refine learning solutions.
• Data literacy skills enabling insightful analysis and measurement of learning program effectiveness.
• Horizon scanning capabilities to anticipate emerging trends and technologies in the learning and development space.
• Solid business acumen with the ability to align learning initiatives with strategic objectives and operational realities.
• Familiarity with contemporary learning platforms including on-demand, social, experiential, and virtual/interactive modalities.
• Demonstrated ability to foster innovation and adaptability within diverse teams and complex project settings.

Qualifications

• Relevant experience in Learning & Developement
• Strong command of English, both written and spoken, is mandatory to operate effectively in a multinational setting.
• Proficiency in Arabic is highly desirable and considered an advantage to effectively engage with local stakeholders and regulatory bodies within the UAE.

About Standard Chartered

We're an international bank, nimble enough to act, big enough for impact. For more than 170 years, we've worked to make a positive difference for our clients, communities, and each other. We question the status quo, love a challenge and enjoy finding new opportunities to grow and do better than before. If you're looking for a career with purpose and you want to work for a bank making a difference, we want to hear from you. You can count on us to celebrate your unique talents and we can't wait to see the talents you can bring us.

Our purpose, to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, together with our brand promise, to be here for good are achieved by how we each live our valued behaviours. When you work with us, you'll see how we value difference and advocate inclusion.

Together we:

• Do the right thing and are assertive, challenge one another, and live with integrity, while putting the client at the heart of what we do
• Never settle, continuously striving to improve and innovate, keeping things simple and learning from doing well, and not so well
• Are better together, we can be ourselves, be inclusive, see more good in others, and work collectively to build for the long term

What we offer

In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing.

• Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations.
• Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum.
• Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns.
• Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits
• A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning.
• Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.