Financial industry professionals must develop and adapt to new skills to be competitive or face the risk of becoming obsolete, according to a report by the CFA Institute.
Nearly half of the 3,800 CFA Institute members and candidates surveyed said they expect their role to be significantly different within five to 10 years, with 5 percent believing the role they perform today will not exist. Among financial advisors in that group, 54 percent expect their role to be substantially different, with 4 percent indicating that their job as it is today will not exist within 5 to 10 years, according to the report.
The report also included a survey of 133 financial industry leaders, including executives from the investment and wealth management sectors, on trends regarding the future of work in investment management.
Furthermore, 89 percent of industry leaders agree that individual roles will be transformed multiple times during their careers, making adaptability and lifelong learning essential skills for future success. The leaders (60 percent) also expect that investment firms will need to increase training and development in the next five to 10 years.
Meanwhile, 87 percent of CFA investment professionals say that training and development opportunities are one of the most important aspects of an employer.
While the most common skills being pursued by respondents are soft skills, alternative investments, and portfolio risk optimization, more than 130 (49 percent) industry leaders say the skills that will be most needed and those that are most difficult to find are T-shaped skills, which were ranked 3.5 times higher in importance than technical skills. T-shaped people, the report explained, are subject matter experts, who can adapt to changing environments and can work across disciplines, which includes being at ease with technology.
Of note, 21 percent of industry leaders said leadership skills were most important, 16 percent said soft skills and 14 percent said technical skills were most important.
The report cited research conducted by Mercer for CFA Institute, which indicates that there will be 1.2 million core investment professionals in 10 years. India, the research shows, is positioned to be the highest growth market, growing as much as 33 percent in the next 10 years and benefitting from the country’s strong economic growth, a steady stream of engineers from its universities, a growing middle class, and its population’s increasing demand for financial services.
The other top growth markets are China, projected to grow at 26 percent; the United Kingdom is projected at 10 percent growth, followed by the U.S. with 9 percent, the report noted.
The report points out that the two trends most cited as driving change in the roles of investment professionals are AI (artificial intelligence), which is displacing and, or enhancing investment roles, making it essential for professionals to become more tech-savvy. And HI (human intelligence), solutions investing and greater customer need integration.