Our aims
We help cultivate and rebalance the talent pipeline of the investment management industry from school room to the boardroom, by increasing access to skills learning and development for all.
We believe that the opportunity for quality professional development training and career promotion should be accessible to all professionals, across all roles and levels, not just the domain of a select few.
Welcome to the City Hive Academy, 2025.
Our Academy programme is based upon three pillars of development used to shape and inform our schedule of workshops and forums.
Balanced
Training covering wellbeing and a work-life balance to connect professionals with themselves in both their professional and personal lives.
Effective
Training themed around both inclusion and work culture for those professionals wishing to support and champion others.
Empowered
Skills training to support professionals with their own career development, goals and professional path.
These pillars are aligned with the ACT Framework, offering professional development training to all staff – across all roles and levels - to inspire equality in the workplace and a stronger work culture.
By building on the insights and learnings from Signatory firms that are completing ACT, which provides professional investors with a framework to understand, create and progress cultural change and be able to effectively communicate progress, the Academy directly supports Signatory firms.
In 2025, the Academy specifically focuses on three themes which reflect emerging workplace trends and challenges identified by the City Hive Leadership team, in consultation with our Academy Advisory Committee and employees from member firms. Getting ahead and informed helps progress towards more inclusive cultures, which in turn helps to create and retain diverse, resilient and ultimately successful team.
2025 Themes
Faster, better, stronger…Fairer?
In our continued quest to make our businesses more productive, technology, data and AI, and their promise to boost speed and efficiency, have been widely embraced. Yet concerns - based on reported data and examples from business, the wider workplace and schools - signals that these ever evolving and widely celebrated technologies have limitations and are vulnerable to biases.
For example, a study found that Google’s online advertising system showed high-paying positions to men more than women, whilst Amazon was forced to stop using its hiring algorithm after finding out it favoured words more likely to be found in men’s CVs and applications(1). In 2020, the UK’s A level grading algorithm downgraded students from lower-income areas more frequently than those from affluent areas(2).
Meanwhile Consumer Duty now demands higher standards for investment firms. Along with a focus on delivering good outcomes for all consumers and ensuring fairness in financial markets, this means ensuring firms and employees alike are equipped to identify, prevent and mitigate biases, and cultivate cultures that focus on customer outcomes.
As the investment industry moves on consumer duty requirements, whilst also navigating technologies that promise better outcomes - but may be leaving the door open to biases, how can we retain the necessary sound judgment and balance to ensure that our drive for efficiency doesn’t lead us to lose sight of the inequalities that could negatively impact our outcomes?
Join Academy roundtables and panels to navigate topics around ever-evolving technology, governance, ethics and implementation, via conversations designed to better understand what is working across the sector and how we can mitigate both legal and inclusion risks.
Enabling and harnessing cognitive diversity
Bringing together the varied experiences and perspectives, creative ideas, thought processes, problem solving approaches and communication styles can lead to tangible, positive effects on team productivity and outcomes.
With this in mind, the Academy continues our focus on the positive effect on business and culture by supporting and championing neurodiversity. Workshops with a highly experienced consultant will focus on training your senior teams to support neurodiverse talent and provide further information on the infrastructure you can implement now to attract and retain talent.
We will also focus on the broader cognitive diversity of teams. A cognitively diverse workforce allows us to leverage the benefits of unique, individual talent through collaboration. Themes will include our own self-awareness and emotional intelligence, understanding different personalities and how to communicate, network and manage relationships in order to build harmonious, happy and balanced teams.
Reimagining resilience: Burnout; the science of happiness; returning to work
We all understand the importance of resilience in the workplace and the ability of our employees to meet and adapt to change, whilst remaining both productive, focused on goals and ultimately positive and engaged, despite external and personal challenges. Yet, poor mental health is costing £51bn a year to the UK economy and 18 million working days according to a 2024 Deloitte Report(3).
Common investment management industry stresses include the return to work after an extended absence, navigating a complex labour market, adapting to a changing industry, or trying to mitigate the risk of workplace and personal burnout.
This year we’ll explore what Heads of Talent and senior leaders from across our member firms are focused on to retain and reward the best talent, including how they approach the different stages of a professional’s career and what our employees value – from graduates through to longer serving staff experiencing life-affecting changes.
We will also continue to explore wellbeing, including happiness, avoiding burnout and recovery strategies. Keep an eye out for more sessions and resources as they drop.
We look forward to welcoming you.
The City Hive Academy Team