Building Skillful and Productive Commercial Bankers from Day 1. Guaranteed.

Hi – Andy Keusal here.  One of the saddest days of my professional career was two weeks after I had been hired by a bank as a Commercial Credit Analyst, or I think what they called a Credit Trainee.  Two weeks prior I had been excited and energized about my new job, but after getting a sense of how much there was to know, and how little of it I knew (after two weeks on the job), I was convinced that I could not be successful in this role. 

And if that was one of the saddest days in my career, then maybe the scariest day was three months later, when I was still showing up for work every day, but now I had a pile of deals on my desk, and my manager was expecting me to write credit packages for each of them that would go to our credit committee.  The reason this situation was so scary for me was that I had almost no understanding of what I was doing, but the nice people at my bank were expecting that I should begin to know what I was doing.

I got up and went into work every day convinced that this would be the day I was going to be fired, because certainly they would know that I had no clue how to analyze credit requests, nor would I ever, at the pace I was on, understand anything about credit risk.

Twenty-six years later, I still have nightmares about those first few months as a Credit Analyst.  That was not a happy scenario; that was not a picture of how a bank wants its newly hired trainee to feel about their new job. 

The good news is that I didn’t get fired, and I survived long enough to become successful there.  But I promised myself that if I ever got into a position where I was responsible for hiring and helping new commercial bankers get started, I’d provide them with a better experience than the one I had.

Is this scenario playing itself out at your bank, too?  You have invested a lot of time and money recruiting and hiring new bankers, but are they productive and flourishing, or are they struggling to get up to speed?  You’re paying each of them $4,000 – $5,000 every month, and that’s an expensive proposition when they’re not yet productive.