Close Emerging Skill

Gaps in Finance

Overview
Most finance leaders currently say their teams need to develop skills in technology
innovation and management, data analysis, business partnership as well as flexibility
and collaboration. Finance leaders must understand how to train these skills and
choose their skill acquisition strategies accordingly.

Key Findings

■ The largest finance skill gaps are currently in data analysis, technology innovation
and management, business partnership and collaboration and flexibility.
■ These skill gaps are either hard-to-train or nearly impossible to train (for more
innate skills).
■ Hard-to-train skills are best addressed through experiential training methods;
innate skills should be either hired for or accessed through internal talent pools.

Recommendations

To close the most critical finance skill gaps, finance leaders should:

■ Determine whether to train, hire or borrow to close skill gaps.

■ Determine which experiential methods you will focus development efforts on for
training hard-to-teach skills like business partnership, data analysis and technology
innovation and management.
■ Hire or borrow talent from internal talent pools to acquire innate or untrainable
skills like flexibility and collaboration.

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Introduction
Finance organizations face a core set of talent gaps. We asked finance leaders
which skills are critically important (according to impact on the organization) but are
currently hard to find among their finance talent pool. As shown in the upper right-
hand quadrant of Figure 1, finance leaders think these 14 skills are most in need of
development.

Figure 1: Finance’s Current Competency Gaps

Finance competencies ranked by current importance and size of current gap 

Looking at these 14 emerging competencies, we can see four broad skill or behavior-
based themes:

■ Data Analysis:  Cleaning, formatting and interpreting complex data to draw out
key insights
■ Technology Innovation and Management:  Organizing the technology
environment
■ Business Partnership:  Understanding the impact of finance on the rest of the
business and how to interact with teams outside of finance

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 ■ Collaboration and Flexibility:  Working effectively with others in a rapidly
changing work environment

The best strategy for obtaining these skill sets depends on their degree of trainability.
For example, untrainable or more innate skills should be selected through hiring, not
developed in a training program. To determine the best strategy, finance leaders need
to understand which skills are trainable and which are not.

Understand Which Skills to Train or Hire For

Choose skill acquisition strategies based on whether skills can be trained.

We asked finance leaders to rate over 50 behaviors and skills that underlie the four
competency areas to determine whether they could be trained. Specifically, we asked
them to rate how much improvement they saw from their employees over a two-year
period. Skills and behaviors that were greatly improved were deemed easy to train;
those that had minimal improvement were deemed hard-to-train; and skills that saw
no or nearly no improvement were deemed innate (not trainable).

From this we inferred whether these skills and behaviors could be trained. Finance
leaders’ responses fell into two categories:

■ Hard to train:  Data analysis, business partnership, technology innovation and

management
■ Innate (or untrainable): Flexibility and collaboration

These results vividly illustrate why skill gaps persist: the skills finance needs most are
either hard-to-train or untrainable.

Hard-to-Train Finance Competency Gaps

Competency gaps that are hard-to-train require targeted strategies from finance
leaders. Data analysis, business partnership and technology management skills cannot
be taught using a one-size-fits-all approach, which is common with traditional
classroom and learning module approaches. Fifty-four percent of employees say they
find it hard to apply these traditional methods to their careers [1].

Instead, finance leaders should pursue experiential methods for teaching data
analysis and business partnership skills. Experiential learning and development is the
knowledge employees derive from tasks or activities they engage in as part of their
work. Our research shows that experiential learning improves employee performance
as much as three times more than formal training (such as lectures and instructional
handouts) [2]. Our research also indicates that helping employees find the right on-
the-job experiences has a 28% impact on skills-preparedness [3].

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Data analysis, business partnership skills and technology management require more
than just knowledge of a set of facts. Attaining competency in these areas requires
constant reinforcement with regular application of skills needed for day-to-day tasks
and real-time feedback to make adjustments. Employees must also learn how to apply
these skills in situations with urgent problems to solve and realistic consequences if
they fail. In short, they require on-the-job learning and real-time coaching.

Leading companies have found various ways to experientially train for certain
competencies. Understanding them will help you to determine the experiential
training options in your own organization.

Business Partnership Skills

Cross-functional learning groups are an effective way of providing experiences that

can build business partnership skills. As a case in point, ATB Financial creates
Action Learning Groups tasked with solving real strategic challenges facing the
company. Finance leaders hand select employees from finance and at least one
employee from another function to spend four to six months working on an especially
challenging business task. An experienced business leader also supervises, provides
advice and models best practices for the group. The group members then make
recommendations at the end of the project before moving back to their normal
positions.

If employees cannot be sent outside of finance for long periods of time, assign projects
to learning groups within finance that will teach specific business partnership skills.
For instance, the electronics company Synopsys assigns revenue recognition projects
to small groups (five to six) of finance employees who lack business partnership
skills. Because revenue recognition requires significant knowledge of the business, the
project forces employees to work together to improve their understanding of how
business practices affect finance.

2
Peer review sessions are also effective at teaching business partnership skills. EMC
conducts peer review sessions where finance employees present their analyses as if
they are presenting them to stakeholders within the businesses. Their peers are then
expected to take the perspective of those stakeholders when providing feedback.
These sessions teach finance employees how to translate financial information into
genuine insights for the business.

Data Analysis Skills

In addition to embedding data analysis training into normal workflows, make

sure that employees have easy access to data analytics experts who can provide
on-time guidance. For example, a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team
teaches data analytic skills by assigning employees a self-directed proactive
project where they are required to own the final analysis. Proactive projects must
consist of challenging problems that are not purely reactive and require time to
think and learn. On this FP&A team, employees might conduct an analysis of
customer segmentation, inconsistencies in revenue forecasting or competitor markets.
Managers and employees work together to carve out protected time every month to

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continue to make progress on these proactive projects alongside other work tasks.
Data analytics experts in the organization are also available throughout the process
to provide feedback and teach critical skills.

Finance leaders can embed data analysis into employees’ workflow by:

■ Providing coaching and peer mentoring by data analytics experts from inside or
outside the function
■ Teaching an analytics process or course to the team or others
■ Acting as a mentor or peer coach for other staff on data analytics

Technology Innovation and Management Skills

Coaching and mentoring are also effective for teaching technology innovation and
management skills. To develop these skills through mentoring, embed technology
management experts into Agile, Six Sigma and other standard processes to provide
feedback. Finance employees are increasingly asked to incorporate technology into
their normal work tasks. Bringing experts into these processes optimizes the learning
potential of everyday technology management.

To build technology management skills through coaching, ask employees questions

that encourage them to think deeper about how technology affects the business, how
technology can improve business processes and ultimately, how to improve the return
on technology investments. Some questions that finance leaders have found helpful
for these purposes include:

■ When considering our broad strategy, what three technology improvements do

you think would help us reach our goals?
■ What factors do you think made our most successful IT projects work?
■ What do you believe are the key risks to our success in technology investments?
■ What technological solutions should we consider here?
■ How adequate are our current systems to handle this?

Finance Competencies to Hire or Borrow

There will be reduced returns on investment in training for skills that finance leaders
identify as innate or untrainable. The best strategy for obtaining these skills is to
reposition, borrow and leverage existing talent from within organization. Using internal
talent is preferable to hiring new employees to reduce onboarding and institutional or
business knowledge ramp-up time.

Flexibility and Collaboration Skills

Finance leaders will need to recruit and assess internal candidates to find people
who possess flexibility and collaboration skills. This is most effective with a standing

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agreement between functions to share resources when needed. Finance leaders
should work with other functions to create a shared talent pool that can be accessed
on an ad hoc and temporary basis. For instance, if finance employees are struggling
to collaborate effectively when producing reports, staff from communications who
possess exceptional collaboration skills can move into finance for two to three weeks
to help complete individual reports. As part of the agreement, finance employees can
move into communications for two to three weeks to help develop the next year’s
budget.

To assess your current talent pool or other high-value internal candidates, conduct an
informal discussion with individual employees using questions from interviews used
to screen external candidates for innate skills like flexibility, change management or
collaboration.

For example, the water technology company Xylem asks hypothetical questions
to gauge candidates’ flexibility in rapidly changing circumstances. Other sample
questions that can be incorporated into the interview guide include:

■ When was the last time you changed or updated your processes?
■ What caused you to change or update those processes? Why haven’t you changed
or updated your processes?
■ What are the top two process improvement activities you would propose now?
■ How would you redeploy resources?

Depending on the details of agreements to share resources between functions, it

might also be possible to let internal candidates serve very short-term (such as three
to four days) assignments in finance to observe these skills at work.

Conclusion
Many of the skills finance needs are not easy-to-train, but they are trainable. For the
few that are not trainable, hiring or borrowing talent is the best strategy.

Apply experiential learning methods to teach skills that are hard-to-train. Learning
groups, proactive projects, peer mentoring, real-time coaching and embedded
experts can all effectively address skills needed for business partnership, data analysis
and technology management and implementation.

Tap into internal talent pools and assess which employees already possess skills that
are innate or nearly impossible to train. Work with other functions to create shared
talent pools if they do not already exist. To find the right internal candidates, ask
questions designed to assess flexibility and collaboration skills.

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About This Research
This research is drawn from our Finance Talent Test (FiTT), Finance 2020 study, 2018
research on Increasing Finance’s Talent Management Maturity as well as research from
our Learning and Development Leadership Council. We surveyed over 1,000 finance
and business staff, interviewed more than 50 finance executives and conducted an
extensive literature review.

[1] CEB 2016 L&D Digital Learner Survey.

[2] CEB Learning & Development Leadership Council, “Unlocking the Value of On-the-
Job Learning,” 2009.

[3]  CEB Learning and Development Leadership Council, “CEB 2018 Shifting Skills
Survey.”

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