Steps to Virtual Success

Apple Federal Credit Union: 2025 BEST Award Winner, #2

Fairfax, Virginia

8-Time Winner

Photo | Mike Morgan

Talent development is key to attracting and retaining skilled and high-potential employees at Apple Federal Credit Union. A core goal of the banking company is to be an employer of choice—a place where employees find satisfaction in growing their careers.

Many factors determine the employer-of-choice status, explains Jennifer Madden, assistant vice president of TD—for example, enabling career growth, providing meaningful work, allowing work-life balance, and empowering employees. The TD strategy is to provide resources and services that align with those factors.

The TD team also seeks to foster more digital innovation within the company, both to improve business outcomes and continue attracting high-quality talent. That's why, in recent years, it has focused on integrating virtual reality and artificial intelligence into its training offerings. Doing so helps employees become more comfortable with using those technologies, not only for training and professional development, but also in their daily workflows.

Creating clear career paths

One of the TD function's goals was to increase transparency around career progression in the company. The team worked with leaders across the organization to identify the qualifications and responsibilities for each position in each division, as well as exactly what an employee would need to receive a promotion to the next level.

Career progression plans now live on an internal website along with a management portal that lists available leadership training opportunities.

"We created career progression transparency because we had received feedback in our staff loyalty survey that they wanted to see it," says Madden. "We believe that by providing a clear road map for advancement and allowing employees to understand the skills and performance needed to reach higher positions, we would increase employee engagement."

The career progression plans, TD envisioned, would also lead to employees' greater sense of ownership over their careers and better relationships with supervisors in establishing annual professional development goals.

Although the initiative is still relatively new, the staff loyalty score has improved by more than two points since TD implemented them in 2024, from 57.2 to 59.8.

The management portal has also helped engage staff with management training courses. The completion rate for one series, Management 200, increased from 57 percent in 2021 to 80 percent at year-end 2024. The number of managers trained went from 22 in 2022–2023 to 37 in 2023–2024.

The TD team also believes that a new career coaching initiative to upskill and reskill staff has helped increase overall employee satisfaction. "The skills covered—such as leadership, networking, and communication—support career readiness," explains Madden. "The program has yielded a 100 percent retention rate and a 33 percent promotion rate."

Getting a boost from VR

In 2024, the TD team began using VR in its Lending Academy to strengthen employees' abilities to communicate loan decisions to members. After in-class discussions, employees take a self-paced VR course that simulates a realistic lending conversation that they may have with a member.

The VR component has been a powerful addition to the course, enabling learners to experience the consequences of their decisions and actions during the simulated scenarios. It also gives the added benefit of providing feedback in real time, so that learners can adjust and revise their choices as they progress through the scenarios.

The results from incorporating VR are positive. The TD team found that employees immediately applied what they had learned instead of taking days or even weeks to apply the new skills, which had been the case before introduction of the VR component.

Employees also reported strong satisfaction with the technology: One hundred percent reported an increase in their experience level following the course, and 75 percent reported an increase from a beginner level to a middle or advanced level. One hundred percent also reported an increase in their comfort level in communicating lending decisions.

Madden says her team plans to expand VR to additional courses. "We are also gathering metrics to add to our TD score card. It's important for us to be able to measure the success of [VR] to include this solution in our hybrid learning environment."

Generative AI at work

Another TD goal is to increase employees' comfort with and ability to use AI in their jobs. The TD team has already incorporated it into its own workflows by using AI to design courses and generate custom course content, quiz questions, and gamification elements. Madden notes that using AI has reduced the time her team takes to produce e-learning courses and results in higher-quality avatars and voice-overs.

"Former technology used robotic voices that frequently mispronounced words, whereas the current generator gives us access to many natural-sounding voices with greatly improved accuracy," Madden explains. "With these updated AI voices, learners are now able to better focus on the content of the video without distraction."

For example, the team uses an AI software platform to deliver scenario-based learning for its Integrity Selling course. The tool produced a realistic human avatar with a background that resembled a local Apple FCU branch. It also enabled the TD team to build flexible gamification into the course while saving time during the overall design and production phases.

Meanwhile, AI remains a focus of the training programs themselves.

"As a financial institution, it is crucial for us to train our staff on the proper use of generative AI to protect our members' information and sensitive data," states Madden. "This past year, we assigned two courses to all our employees [that] aim to educate our staff on efficiently using AI to obtain accurate, credible answers while safeguarding personally identifiable member information and proprietary corporate data."

View the entire list of 2025 BEST Award winners.