Three paths to upskilling your finance staff with Adriana Carpenter

Adriana Carpenter is CFO at Emburse. She’ll appear on a panel on upskilling and reskilling as part of our upcoming CFO Brew live event, Next-Gen Finance: Future-Proofing Your Business Operations. Ahead of the event, she told us via email about the skills finance teams need, especially in the area of AI.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are some key skills finance professionals need today?

Finance professionals need to understand how businesses operate…In reality, a finance professional is only as good as their ability to apply data and metrics to add value to the business.

Understand how business functions work together to drive value [and] how the metrics surfaced by the finance team can be used by partners across the business to make better decisions. Understand the operating context in your industry that gives the metrics meaning.

In particular, what skills are needed to work with AI and other advanced technologies?

Two things are essential when applying AI in the context of the finance department. The first is good and high-quality data. The second is applying tools to assess and learn from the data.

Start by understanding the data attributes your team needs to measure to get the outcome you’re looking for. To get an AI tool or other finance technology to work, you need to ensure all the data points that those tools can ingest are at your fingertips before you can surface the insights. Identify the necessary data points by outlining your desired outcome and then mapping it back to measurable data attributes.

Make sure [the data] has integrity, regardless of the source. This will ensure that, once deployed, the AI tool will provide the finance organization with high-quality insights. For example, if a general ledger isn’t tracking data on each line item, you will never be able to get insights from the data you’re extracting from the ledger. Tag each data point at the 5-foot level before you go to the 100- or 1,000-foot level.

How can CFOs identify skill gaps in their finance departments?

A smart CFO will define clear expectations of the metrics and the business outcomes that they plan to measure…Identify where you and/or your finance team will get the needed metrics or produce them based on available data. Among your team of finance professionals, ask who has the skillsets to produce those things? Then you can start to identify gaps.

What are some steps companies can take to upskill finance employees?

First, leverage the vendors providing the tools you want to implement within your team. Nearly all vendors provide training. Take advantage of the training and enablement of the tools you’re paying for to maximize your investment. There are [also] consultants who provide free training.

Most of all, identify champions within the finance team. Make the person who is obsessed with systems and data the resource across the finance team. This is a great leadership opportunity for someone to step up and be a cross-team champion. Provide them with goals, expectations, or even incentives to facilitate upskilling.

As a leader, highlight the training options or give your team’s champion the power to educate the team about their options. Build in a culture of accountability and expectations that everyone is going to upskill together.