Why Finance Has a Skills Problem No One Is Talking About
There is a lot of noise right now about talent shortages in finance.
Not enough accountants.
Not enough analysts.
Not enough people with system or transformation experience.
But in my experience, that is not the real issue.
The bigger problem is that many finance teams are full of capable people who no longer have the skills that create the most value in modern businesses.
That is not a criticism of those people. It is a reflection of how the profession has evolved and what it now expects from them.
The skills finance used to reward
For a long time, finance rewarded people for being technically excellent.
Accuracy mattered. Controls mattered. Process mattered.
And rightly so.
These skills built trust in the function and protected businesses from risk. They still matter today. But they are no longer enough.
Because being good at producing numbers is not the same as being good at using them.
What businesses now expect from finance
In most growing organisations, finance is no longer just there to report what happened.
It is expected to:
- Influence commercial decisions
- Shape strategy
- Challenge assumptions
- Improve performance
- Partner with the business, not sit behind it
That shift changes the skills that matter.
- Judgement becomes more important than precision.
- Communication becomes as important as calculation.
- Context becomes as important as content.
And this is where the real gap begins to show.
The uncomfortable reality inside many teams
Many finance professionals were trained for a world where their value came from technical mastery.
They were not trained for:
- Ambiguity
- Commercial debate
- Influencing senior stakeholders
- Making decisions with incomplete information
So you end up with teams full of people who are very good at producing information, but far less confident when it comes to using it to shape outcomes.
That does not make them weak professionals. It makes them products of a system that has not kept up with what the business now needs.
How AI is exposing the problem
AI and automation are not creating this issue. They are revealing it.
As reporting, forecasting and reconciliations become faster and more automated, the value of finance shifts almost entirely to interpretation and judgement.
AI does not replace finance professionals.
It removes the safety net that used to hide the skills gap.
When the mechanics disappear, what remains is thinking.
And that is where some teams struggle.
Why hiring is making this worse
Most finance hiring still prioritises:
- Sector experience
- System knowledge
- Technical depth
All important. None sufficient on their own.
Very few hiring processes truly test:
- How someone thinks
- How they challenge
- How they influence
- How they make decisions under pressure
So businesses keep hiring technically strong people and hoping they will become commercially impactful later.
Sometimes they do. Often they do not.
What strong finance teams are doing differently
The finance teams that perform best are not the ones with the most qualified accountants.
They are the ones with people who can combine technical credibility with commercial judgement.
They hire for:
- Learning ability
- Curiosity
- Communication
- Decision making
- Comfort with ambiguity
They still care deeply about technical standards. They just no longer stop there.
The real issue no one is addressing
This is not a shortage of talent.
It is a mismatch between what finance professionals have been developed to do and what businesses now expect them to deliver.
Until that changes, no amount of hiring, AI investment or restructuring will fully solve the problem.
Because finance’s future is not built on doing things right.
It is built on doing the right things.
