What skills will finance workers and organizations need in an uncertain future?
Learning and development teams are working tirelessly to prepare firms and workers for a world of accelerating technological disruption. Overcoming people’s natural reluctance to change is imperative at both an individual and organizational level.
The march of technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, is transforming the nature of work. Many roles in the financial services sector could be automated away, and the skills needed to succeed in the future may be very different from in the past.
“The number one skill is going to be learning agility,” said Sagar Goel, Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group and Global Insights leader at BCG Henderson Institute, BCG's strategy think tank. In other words, “the ability to unlearn, relearn and learn continuously throughout your life.”
Moreover, as low-skilled tasks are replaced by AI, demand for high-skilled talent is likely to continue to outstrip demand.
As such, reskilling, upskilling and lifelong learning in both technical and human skills have become more important than ever to help workers stay relevant and allow firms to realize the full productivity-enhancing and innovation-generating potential of new technology (see Figure 1).
Forecasting skills demand
But what skills will workers and organizations need in an uncertain future?
Lara Partridge, HSBC’s Head of Talent Asia Pacific, said: “We’re shifting from reactive filling of skills demand to becoming proactive and sophisticated about forecasting our future demand.” To do that, “we've got to start being much more long-term in our people plans, and start bringing some of our human resources practices much more in proximity with our business strategy.”
To provide a sense of how rigorously some firms are seeking to identify, catalog and cultivate necessary skills among their employees, Mark Hoban, Chair of the UK’s Financial Services Skills Commission (FSSC) said that some members have compiled skills taxonomies that can have as many as 3,000 different skills they need in their workforce. They then assess people's competence against that skills taxonomy.
“They’ve thought through what skills their businesses need, and can then start to see where gaps are emerging,” he said. “Then they can think through the next stage, which is ‘how do I fill that gap?’”
Contemplating thousands of skills is daunting. The FSSC has, however, shortlisted 13 “future skills” considered to be especially critical to business success, based on member feedback. These include vital technical skills such as data analysis, digital literacy, software development, cybersecurity and machine learning, along with core human skills such as empathy, adaptability, creative thinking and coaching (see Figure 2).
Shelf life of skills
These skills should be relevant for years to come, but it’s very difficult to predict what other specific skills might become more or less important in the future, given the pace of technological and societal disruption.
It’s a subject of intense speculation. A group of academics at Harvard University claim that in the age of AI, “the average half-life of skills is now less than five years, and in some tech fields it’s as low as two and a half years.”
For Goel, lifelong learning is “an individual level challenge.” Although organizations increasingly provide training for various skills such as AI, uptake among employees often falls short.
He said: “I may have 50 priorities and 10 assignments and a presentation to prepare for next week. Am I going to be disciplined enough to take time out, even if it’s just 10 minutes a week, to keep myself updated and start tinkering and experimenting with some of these AI tools — even though it’s becoming very important?”
In its 2024 State of the Industry report, the Association for Talent Development found that the average finance employee spends 26 hours per year on formal learning — considerably higher than the average across all industries of 17.4 hours. Still, Goel said that number “needs to be 20 times or even more than that. That's how important this is going to be.” He acknowledged, however, that “it's really a question of when each of us actually starts realizing that and putting it into action. A lot of behavior change is required.”
Goel suggests using behavioral hacks to create an urgency to learn. “A few years back, when AI was getting hotter, although I'm not a technologist, I knew I had to start getting on top of this,” he said. “So I set up a client conversation on the topic in six weeks, which forced me to prepare myself in that time. In our busy schedules, we need to embed such behavioral hacks to make learning part of our work.”
Rebecca Kellogg, Global Head of UBS University, the bank’s in-house learning and development institution, was asked recently which three qualities people needed to cultivate to become effective at developing vital future skills. “Curiosity, curation and communication,” she said.
Curiosity keeps people abreast of the forces set to transform their industry. Curation helps them pick out the information relevant to them and decide how they can prepare themselves. And the relevant course of action must then be clearly communicated “to ourselves, our teams and our employees, keeping the big picture in mind,” said Kellogg.
Overcoming fear of change
It’s also important to realize that people’s reluctance to embark on training could also stem from a fear of change, a natural human response.
“We can help people by changing the narrative,” said Kellogg, “showing them that it’s preparing them for something positive in the future rather than taking something away from them. That generally makes them much more inclined to feel good about it and give it a go.”
Kellogg likens acquiring skills to packing a rucksack for a picnic. “Pack wisely, pack a nutritious meal, pack some snacks that are fun, and go off and have an experience,” she said.
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