Alan Hobbs, Transformation Lead, Legal & General Asset Management.

Sara Benwell: How can firms identify gaps in skills within their organisations?

Alan Hobbs: First, you need to take a step back and think about what you're trying to achieve as an organisation before jumping to identify and analyse skills gaps. Bridging any skills gap is a decision on how you get from where you are currently to be where you want to be. Therefore, it’s only when you have clarity over what you're trying to achieve and how you’re trying to achieve it that you can really engage with the skills gap. You need to answer questions such as:

• What's your strategy?
• What are you trying to win at?
• What capabilities are you trying to put in place to be good enough to win?

The second step is to think about what capabilities you need and where you seek competitive advantage, which should inform your decision making on how to bridge any gaps.

"It's not a one-off exercise, but rather a process. It requires thought and effort, and is organisation specific."

Every organisation has a different purpose and different goals. But the key point is that you must be deliberate and there needs to be a reasonably consistent process. It's not a one-off exercise, but rather a process where you say: ‘what capabilities do we no longer need, what should we reduce, start or increase?’ You then have to consider how to best execute bridging the gap. It requires thought and effort, and is organisation specific.

Sara: What are some of the emerging skill sets that you think will create added value for fund operators?

Alan: It depends as every organisation has a different purpose, different goals, and different approaches. However, there are some clear and consistent themes across the industry you can't ignore like the increasing value of clean data and increasing automation to improve efficiency; but how you react must be rooted in what you're doing as a business.

If you make certain assumptions around fund finance businesses, then there is an emerging multidisciplinary approach. The first pillar is the need to marry finance with data analysis to drive insight. This would include understanding how data flows, what the governance is, the proportions of structured and unstructured data to be able to deliver consistent clean data and drive meaningful insights. You also must have the tools and skillsets in place to get to those insights efficiently.

Another pillar is commerciality within finance, which is multidisciplinary in the sense you you've got to have finance people who understand the business and are credible partners. Finally, there is a there's a pillar around technical and operational, which is foundational and driven by the imperatives of governance, audit, and efficiency. These are not new but are fundamental and how you carry them to meet your businesses goals continues to evolve.

What you can do is make deliberate decisions about how much you dial up those skills. The multidisciplinary element is breaking the boundaries down and working with data, working with technology, working with the business such as marketing and distribution.

"How you combine the different elements of your operating model together will determine whether you create a platform greater or less than the sum of its parts."

You can also look at more recent trends that fall into the shiny and exciting bucket. A fairly recent innovation that was going to revolutionise the industry was robotics and there are some great things about it, but it required processes and has limitations that you need to understand like any process. Ultimately how you combine the different elements of your operating model together will determine whether you create a platform greater or less than the sum of its parts.

There is also undoubted value in cognitive diversity and having different experiences and views. Some other areas are, let's face it, a bit more generic, so, by having somebody from a different background can really add value and bring that diversity. However, in a regulated environment some areas require some very specific domain and technical knowledge.

Sara: How can you create a culture that allows people to upskill and progress in a way that makes them more valuable to the business?

Alan: It's a hard question because it's such a big area. There are a million and one ways to influence culture – some structured and purposeful others more rooted in individual action and leadership. I completely buy into the benefits of supporting people to build new skills and capabilities. If you are trying to create a culture where people are actively encouraged to upskill then you have to be deliberate in the way you align upskilling to the organisations capabilities and strategy.

"Structures such as 360-degree performance reviews, career plans, and buddying can help individuals manage their careers, but structure by itself is unlikely to change a culture."

If, for example, that includes creating pathways for people to move through your organisation, to gain cross-functional knowledge then you have to create those pathways. If it's about retaining people for longer, then it's a different decision and the type of skills potentially more aligned to individual goals than just corporate ones.

Structures such as 360-degree performance reviews, career plans, and buddying can be positive and can help individuals manage their careers, but structure by itself is unlikely to change a culture. To gain value from upskilling, it must be more deliberate in the context of the organisation's purpose, strategy, and capabilities.

Alan Hobbs will be speaking on bridging the skills shortage gap at the Fund Operator Summit | Europe 2022 on Wednesday, 16 November.

 

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