How easy do you and your team members find it to acknowledge and assess financial operations skills gaps? Do you also actively ask for help to bridge them?
Education institutes persistently tell us to prepare ourselves for the working world. However, formal education doesn’t necessarily prepare people for specific jobs or roles – and certainly not jobs within Financial Operations. For young people joining the workforce, the employability skills gap is a significant barrier to success. In fact, it is highly improbable that anyone will know everything they’ll ever need to at this point.
That’s why we’ve been thinking about the need for continuous learning opportunities for Finance Teams. We believe that learning should be a lifelong commitment.
The skills gap between what individuals know, and what businesses need to achieve can widen rapidly and unexpectedly.
The employability skills gap refers to the skills people need to succeed in employment. These can be soft skills, such as communication, decision making and problem-solving which are imperative to succeeding in all workplaces. Within Financial Operations, Robert Walters highlights that there is a 60% skills gap in Commercial Aptitude, a 48% gap in persuasion and influencing skills and even a 39% skills gap in stakeholder management.
It’s clear that anyone joining the workforce must develop their skillset in line with business needs. But skills gaps aren’t just something we must consider for inexperienced team members – they can also emerge for very experienced team members. For example, implementing a new internal software solution can create significant skills gaps across current Financial Operations team members.
How confident are you that your team are proficient in spotting and preventing fraud risks? Can they strongly understand how new technology can improve and streamline processes? The key to managing all skills gaps is recognising that each individual team member will have different development areas, and it is likely that the way they learn will also vary.
Building a Continuous Learning Culture in the workplace can sometimes be difficult to get everyone on board. Therefore, starting with Personal Development Plans can help highlight employees’ skills gaps to themselves.
Download your free Personal Development Plan and skills gap audit. Get started today
