GBS: Executives Lose Sleep Over Talent Deficits

By Nilly Essaides
May 15, 2019

It was a packed room at the last breakout session on the future of the workforce at The Hackett Group’s 2019 Best Practices Conference. With 45 minutes standing between participants and cocktails, this was a strong sign of just how concerned are business services functional leaders about the talent challenge. By 2022, 52% of employees will have to be re-skilled or up-skilled.

Talent deficits have been a chronic problem for finance. They’ve only been compounded by the function’s digital transformation. The Hackett Group research shows that 75% of finance executives expect digital to have a high or very high impact on finance roles. It’s whats keeping CFOs up at night. Continued talent shortages mean we’re not going to hire our way out of it. What can finance leaders do? Invest more in talent development, through on-the-job training (skills learning in practice), online training and strong support through mentoring and coaching.

A good starting point is building competencies in three buckets: customer-centric or service excellence, analytics and intelligent automation. finance digitaltransformation talentstrategy HackettBPC talentdevelopment