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According to an article in today’s Financial Times, skills shortages remain an issue in the financial sphere. This is despite research by the likes of Morgan McKinley showing that new candidates outnumbered new jobs by 2.3 to one in July.
The FT says the skills shortages apply specifically to risk and compliance officers, insurance underwriters, and claims and business development specialists. Recruiters say this is mostly true.
Gail Danvers, managing consultant at PSD Group, says there are definite skills shortages in quantitative risk management, mostly because the jobs are very specific and skills aren’t often transferable. “There aren’t suddenly people with these skills on the market just because of the recession,” she says.
Phil Bainbridge, an insurance partner at Odgers Berndtson, says there are also skills shortages in the insurance roles specified by the FT, as well as insurance risk and compliance. “There are also issues around the quality of talent in some parts of the insurance sector,” he says.
However, Marnie Woolf at compliance recruiters Woolf & Co. says there aren’t really any skills shortages in compliance.
“I am seeing very, very good people struggling to find the right opportunity – people who could have had their pick of three or four roles two years ago,” she says. “In the past, there were always talent shortages for compliance staff in fixed income and fund management. It’s possible that demand may come back next year. However, compliance hiring lags the front office by around 12 months.”
They could always do something completly stupid such as hire train people to do the job.
This way they can actually increase the pool of skilled labour and keep salary costs down.
What is wrong with this industry is a wholesale lack of interest from companies in training their staff borne out of keeping short term costs low, which has resulted in companies poaching staff from other companies and bidding up salaries – the very thing that they keep on whingeing about.
The problem with risk departments especially quantitative risk is that the skills they request e.g solid quant, VBA/C++ programming, extensive product knowledge etc are a set of skills that are even beyond what the front office structring/trading desks want if not equal. If I had these skills why would I want to work in Risk rather than the significantly higher paying front office areas? In fact I work in the front office in exotic derivatives and dont have a maths degree, nor programming skills. I would probably struggle to get a job in the lower paying area of risk. Simply put, there is not a skills shortage but a shortage of bids for areas like risk. Risks departments need to improve their salaries or simply hire people with different skill sets and train them up.
UK companies aren’t interested in training in general, not just in the financial sector. Get a few temps in as and when the need arises, pay ‘em loads then let ‘em go as and when!
Not unlike our Premier League. Get skilled foreigners in so a team can be top of the table – never mind about working your way up – while paying lip service to the lack of home-grown youngsters who are desperate for a chance.
As the Head of the UK Operations of First Finance (www.first-finance.com) we recently completed a confidential survey of senior bankers and HR professionals (downloadable from the homepage).
Interestingly, but probably unsurprisingly, the biggest skills/ and knowledge gaps facing Banks were:
(i) Knowledge of regulatory standards
(ii) Communication & Management skills and
(iii) Risk Assessment and Management.
Financial services companies have had to come to terms with huge turbulence over the last two years, especially as governments are bringing forward tighter regulation of the whole sector. In the current economic climate, training is not a luxury – it is a necessity, and financial institutions cannot afford these skills gaps.
The survey also found that learning and development – L&D – managers (the experts) often scored their satisfaction levels even lower than operational managers. Subsequent interviews confirmed that L&D managers believe that line managers are not recognising weaknesses within their teams and that skills training is not being prioritised by operational managers