David Walsh

Group head of HR

MasterCard Asia Pacific Middle East & Africa

The biggest HR challenge that we faced during the downturn] is the retention and the development of our talent. Budgets are tight, but we are still investing significantly in learning and development.

We are investing in certain management development programmes for some of our key talent. We are investing in our sales force as well, in terms of customer relationship management training, to make sure we are helping them become even more professional than they are today. So even in lean times, it’s about retaining and developing the skills of the workforce that we have.

For MasterCard, the learning and development budget is not the first to go. We have kept it level. Mainly because one, if you don’t invest in the sales force, you are not going to get any returns and two, we need to equip our managers with the best skills to build a even better workplace so that we can hold on and retain our key talent.

Because we have done [training programmes] in Europe, Latin America and some of it out here [Asia], the word-of-mouth is that “you really need to do it, it’s a great programme”. So we do have a lot of interest [from employees who wish to attend the training].