As disruption increases, finance professionals need to take charge of their upskilling

As the pace of technological change accelerates and uncertainty permeates the business environment, today’s CFO needs to have a much broader, much more strategic, forward-looking skill set than their predecessors, one that goes far beyond traditional career and skills development pathways. So unless you want to be a CFO stuck in the stone ages of fax machines and manual journal entries, it’s time to skill up.

“The skills that you need as an accountant are very different than they used to be,” said Blake Oliver, host of the Cloud Accounting Podcast and founder and CEO of Earmark, a continuing education platform for accountants. “What is a lot more important is being able to analyze, to make a decision, to do that higher-level thinking.”

That means that CFOs—and aspiring CFOs—need to be proactive and look for more creative ways to develop their skills, often on their own time.

“Look for opportunities, especially in operational finance. Get yourself into a situation where you know the business, because that makes you that much more credible,” said Edith Hamilton, a CFO executive coach based in California.

Pressing need. Upskilling isn’t just a matter of career advancement, it could mean career survival (or not). A 2019 research paper by the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA)  found that technology—especially AI and big data—are disrupting management accounting and threatening to displace many management accountants in the coming years.

The IMA study found that “the reality is that many traditional ‘accounting’ jobs that exist today may not exist in a few years.”

The good news is that there’s significant demand for highly skilled finance professionals who create opportunities for themselves. Robert Half’s 2022 Hiring Trends report found that “87% of finance and accounting managers said it’s challenging to find skilled professionals” and that there was a particular need for finance professionals with financial planning and accounting (FP&A), financial reporting, and general accounting skills.

But even with organizations chipping in, accounting and finance professionals need to take charge of their skills development in a volatile world.

This too shall pass. The first step is to accept that no matter how skilled you are now and how prestigious your current title might be, job conditions and requirements will always change, according to Hamilton. And she cautions CFOs against resisting that change out of fear.

“That mindset of, ‘You don’t have to be perfect, and you don’t have to be [in] control’—that is so hard for some people, especially because controllership is so important in finance,” Hamilton said. “The capacity and the willingness to change and to not resist it—change is gonna happen, whether you go with it or not.”

Engaging with other finance professionals through networking or mentoring to discover their best practices or innovations that they are implementing is another effective way to upskill, Hamilton said.

“Many CFOs are honored and are willing to mentor and share and cross-pollinate like that, because you’ll have ‘Aha!’ moments of how others are doing it,” Hamilton said. “That really accelerates your ability to visualize how you can make this happen.”

Speaking of passes…When it comes to developing the soft skills—like communication, emotional intelligence, leadership, and presentation that organizations are now demanding of CFOs—practice is the key, according to Oliver.

And while the thought of being a CFO on social media might be slightly terrifying, the basic idea is a solid one: You have to branch out into areas you’re unfamiliar with, not just to connect with a younger generation, but to fully understand where your company and your job fit into the ever-changing finance ecosystem. If the chair of the SEC can have his own YouTube show, why can’t you?

“I encourage people who are nervous about presenting [to] start a podcast, start a YouTube channel, or maybe just start posting on TikTok or Instagram, and share your knowledge,” Oliver said. “There’s really no excuse now; if you have a smartphone, you can be putting your knowledge out there in the world.”

CFOs on TikTok? Of course it’s a thing, and they often impart wisdom, intentional or otherwise. Like this CFO who proved the wisdom of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky: You have to go “where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”—DA