Australia’s biggest bank launches second software engineer training hub

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has opened its second technology hub in the country in the city of Melbourne.

The tech hub has been designed to support over 400 software developers, cloud engineers, and cyber specialists, and help create new opportunities for Victoria’s expanding digital economy workforce, the bank revealed yesterday.

The hub is based in the heart of Melbourne’s central business district and is the second major tech hub the CBA has opened in the last six months. In February, it opened a hub in Adelaide to attract the best tech talent from across South Australia.

CBA aims to provide software engineering students from Monash University and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) with job placements in a range of engineering roles, such as cloud, data, analytics, and software engineering.

“Establishing a tech hub in Melbourne puts us in a great position to tap into Victoria’s digital technology industry, which is not only internationally recognised, but incredibly robust and competitive thanks to support from the government and the education sector,” said Brendan Hopper, chief information officer for Technology at CBA. “Melbourne itself is the home to Australia’s top 20 tech companies. There’s already such a vibrant digital community and well-established network of tech specialists that we want to tap into.”

CBA also revealed it has plans to open more tech hubs across Australia to make the most of technology skills in other states and territories. The bank also operates a major technology centre in South Eveleigh in Sydney.

Lawrence Cavedon, associate dean of data science at RMIT University, said the CBA partnership would offer students real-world, skill-building experiences while also supporting digital transformation through the development of future-focussed technology experiences.

“RMIT is committed to working together with industry to offer its students practical training and industry relevant curriculum. Through dedicated software engineering placements available through this CBA program, we will ensure that CBA has a pipeline to employing future job-ready graduates at the University,” said Cavedon.

Currently, CBA is offering a number of job positions at the Melbourne CBD tech hub including senior software engineer, systems engineer for cloud and DevOps, and data engineer.

The opening of the new tech hub comes at a time where over 90% of Australian and New Zealand businesses believe that skills shortages will impact operations or growth in the next year. Recruitment firm Hays also found in June that 68% of Australian employees said they would benefit financially from changing jobs, with the top factors driving turnover across organisations are a lack of new challenges, an uncompetitive salary, and a lack of promotional opportunities.