Attracting, retaining and developing exceptional talent
Attracting, developing and retaining top talent from around the world is essential to driving Responsible Growth. This starts with how we recruit new teammates and extends to the many ways we support their professional development and career growth.
Attracting Talent
Building a strong pipeline of talent means finding and hiring candidates who are committed to our purpose and have a passion for serving our clients and communities. This spans programs from entry-level hiring through more senior-level recruiting.
Students join us from more than 400 universities across the country and around the world for entry-level opportunities through our highly competitive campus program. We partner with colleges and universities, including public and private universities, liberal arts colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, historically black colleges and universities, women’s colleges, men’s colleges, military academies and religious institutions, that bring us a broad range of candidates. In addition, we’ve developed partnerships with 34 community colleges to collaborate on a career readiness curriculum for jobs in financial services and as a means to connect Bank of America with the best talent.
In 2024, we continued to hire teammates whose broad range of perspective, experience and skills will help enable us to serve our clients at the global, national and local levels.
Supporting career development
One of the ways we invest in our teammates is through The Academy at Bank of America. The Academy offers structured programs, on-demand education, and a wide array of tools and resources to help teammates develop their skills and grow their careers. Our onboarding experience connects teammates to our core values and purpose, providing education that helps them hit the ground running in a new role; and we offer continued professional development as they build a successful career with the company.
In 2024, The Academy launched streamlined digital platforms to improve the onboarding experience for new teammates and their managers. As part of onboarding, The Academy delivers a consistent orientation to teammates across the globe. This helps provide the tools needed for every employee to fully understand how we drive Responsible Growth and provides an introduction to our company and culture. New teammates across the company participate in this orientation, including more than 2,100 interns and 2,000 full-time campus hires who joined our company last year. Teammates new to their roles participate in programs that offer support through cohort-based high-touch experiences and skill-building opportunities.
And when teammates are ready for a new role, we provide accessible, high-quality training on skills applicable in roles across our company, job coaching and access to opportunities to identify and pursue new challenges across the company. This includes on-demand education that provides self-directed sessions to help teammates advance their skills in areas such as client engagement, problem solving, data management and more. In 2024, The Academy launched the Bank of America Skills Library as a resource for teammates to build top skills that are aligned to roles across the company. This is part of our continued focus on career mobility and professional development.
We also drive innovative learning through immersive technology. We offer a comprehensive set of tools leveraging technologies, such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence and practice simulations, within our financial centers, and have expanded this to contact centers across the U.S. We’ve received consistent teammate feedback that the practice repetitions help them deliver better service to our clients and customers.
Investing in our leaders and managers
Through assessments, professional coaching and a consistent manager curriculum, we continually strive to build managers’ skills to better equip them for success and help them progress in their careers, ultimately strengthening our pipeline of leaders and instilling our values throughout the company.
In 2021, we launched a manager development program built around eight expectations of managers at Bank of America. The curriculum was created in response to employee feedback and focuses on what being a successful manager at the company means — from leading a team to drive business outcomes, to being a financial steward, to effectively managing risk and more. It culminates in a capstone experience that helps enable managers to integrate the concepts and build an action plan to apply what they’ve learned. More than two-thirds of our managers have completed the development curriculum, including participation in their capstone experience.
Managers are also regularly engaged through our Manager Excellence program. Consultants provide virtual or in-person sessions to help managers build their skills and connect everyday decisions to enterprise priorities, and managers can connect to peers for advice and dialogue through an internal online social community.
We also launched a new Emotional Wellness for Managers training module in 2024 that helps managers understand how strengthening their own emotional wellness can help them create an environment where teams can succeed and managers can respond appropriately to stress, leading from a position of strength. This is designed to result in more effective people managers and coaches — one of our eight expectations of managers — and an environment where teammates feel more comfortable discussing well-being.
Measuring employee engagement and turnover
Each year, our Employee Engagement Survey gathers teammate feedback across the company to shape and inform our work.
More than 178,000 teammates shared their thoughts by participating in our 2024 survey. Our Employee Engagement Index Score is well above industry benchmarks and reflects our collective efforts to be a Great Place to Work for our teammates.
After this year’s survey results were tallied, leaders and managers across the company engaged more than 25,000 teammates in more than 1,700 listening sessions, during which more than 2,800 Operational Excellence opportunities were discussed.
The results of the survey and these listening sessions, and the process of analyzing results to help drive continuous improvement that follows, are discussed with the Board of Directors at least annually. We believe our low employee turnover reflects the strength of our employee engagement results and how our teammates view Bank of America as an employer of choice.
We offer a variety of resources and programs that support career growth and development for a good reason: We want teammates to have long-term careers with our company. In 2024 alone, more than 12,000 teammates found new roles within the company, and during the past five years on average, 42% of our roles have been filled internally. This is a reflection of our ongoing focus and investment in professional development to drive all teammates to achieve their career goals.