The skills gap challenge: knowing what you have – and what you need
Investment managers are assessing the skills they will need to compete in a constantly shifting world.
The pace of technological and regulatory change today means that financial services companies must be more proactive than ever when it comes to assessing their skills needs. It also makes accurate predictions more difficult than in the past.
As job descriptions become more fluid, the emphasis in recruitment and learning is moving to skills rather than roles.
“In the past it was all about roles – you needed a certain number of financial analysts or risk managers,” said Claire Tunley, CEO at the UK’s Financial Services Skills Commission (FSSC). “If people left, you recruited to fill the roles. But today people talk more about the skills that make up those roles.”
A focus on skills allows companies to build a nimble and flexible workforce that can adapt to an uncertain future. “Skills have created the possibility of scenario planning both for talent development and for the redesign of roles and work overall in a much more granular way than what people could do before with jobs,” said Ina Gantcheva, Partner in the Human Capital practice at Deloitte.
The challenge for investment firms is that skills are not as simple to measure or count as roles. Human resources executives stress the need for a structured approach.
A data challenge
The starting point is usually to assess what skills an organization already has, before moving onto what it needs. This requires a structured approach, hence today’s trend towards skills libraries, taxonomies and architectures.
“The standard challenge that people cite is the speed of change, and I don’t disagree, but I think it’s also useful to imagine a scenario where we could perfectly predict what we needed next year,” said Whitney Coggeshall, Director of Product Management at CFA Institute. “Even if we could do that, we’d still run into issues because determining who has which skills and to what degree is very difficult.”
For that reason, many organizations have often not prioritized that effort.
“Historically, what we are talking about is strategic workforce planning, and it was a challenge for companies even before the world of AI,” said Bhushan Sethi, a consultant with long experience in financial services and Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern School of Business. “The problem is that while firms do evaluate performance, they haven’t generally maintained skills inventories or credentials in a real-time way – unless required to do so in order to meet a regulatory commitment for certain staff, such as in banking.”
The effort to identify and catalogue skills is fundamentally a data challenge. A broad term like “project management” might suggest a different set of capabilities at different organisations – or even different parts within one organization.
“The work of capturing skills and predicting skills is really about data,” said Frances Symes, Senior Manager in the Human Capital practice at Deloitte. “How do you manage all that data, and how do you differentiate between what you need now and in the future?”
One answer to that can be AI, which today offers powerful ways to analyse large amounts of employee data and apply predictive analytics to assess where skills gaps may lie now and in the future.
AI as a driver
The adoption of AI technology is only making workforce planning and skills needs assessments even more relevant. As agentic AI gains traction, tasks will increasingly be carried out by autonomous systems, even if humans remain in the loop. “What this means is that we are going to have to go down to the task level within every process across multiple functions to identify agentic AI opportunities, redesign jobs and reassess which skills are needed,” said Sethi.
And even if a broad need can be predicted, it can be challenging to understand with any precision what abilities will be required to meet it. “Things are moving more quickly – people don’t feel confident predicting in detail,” said Tunley. “We might know that the future will be GenAI-enabled, but what skills will be needed to make best use of it?”
A recent post on CFA Institute Enterprising Investor explored the progress that large language models (LLMs) had made in navigating and analysing defined bodies of knowledge and extensive training data, such as that which exists for the CFA® Program, but that while an LLM could pass an exam, it would not replace analysts.
While AI is forcing tough questions around career progression pathways across the industry, forward-thinking organisations will recognise that they need to be developing the leaders of the future.
“I have clients that have decided they want entry-level hires because they need to learn the skills that they will need later,” said Sethi. “We all use calculators, but we still make children learn their multiplication tables, because it is about foundational understanding.”
The importance of flexibility
One approach to the challenge of a rapidly evolving environment is to abandon attempts at precise, granular predictions and instead focus on hiring for and nurturing those qualities that will make workers able to tackle whatever emerges – the human skills that the finance industry has been targeting.
“What you can perhaps say is that no matter what the future holds, we will need people that have good critical thinking, or adaptability,” said Tunley. “So although you can’t tell exactly what is going to change, you can still prepare for it.” The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that analytical thinking was the top core skill for employers.
Determining exact needs when those arguably cannot be known also carries an opportunity cost for a firm. “Spending your energy on that means you are not spending it on the other things you need to do,” said Coggeshall. “Hiring for adaptability instead means that you will have a workforce that is ready to evolve with you.”
“My pet peeve is people saying that human skills will become the new differentiator because I believe they have always been the differentiator,” added Coggeshall. “That’s why leadership development programs have long been built around communication, emotional intelligence, influence, and other deeply human skills. But what will happen is that they will become more important at lower levels of an organization now.”
Ultimately, it’s about finding the sweet spot where multiple types of skill intersect. “Human skills plus technical is the important fusion today,” said Sethi. “You don’t get a free pass for not understanding your business model because you have great empathy. You’ve got to have substance, or you will get found out.”
Discover how experts in the financial industry are navigating the future of skills, and talent management:
How AI-powered learning can upskill teams in the investment industry
Why skills taxonomies and architectures are critical to navigating the financial industry’s future
From theory to application: Thinking beyond skills in the financial industry workplace
What skills will finance workers and organizations need in an uncertain future?
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