The skills nobody's training for
The skills nobody's training for
Rowan Malherbe, Academy Principal, BDO Academy
For years, the assumption in finance was straightforward: learn the technical material, keep it current, and you're set for a long career. That assumption is breaking down, and not for the reasons most people expect.
It's not that technical knowledge stops mattering. It's that technical knowledge is becoming necessary but no longer sufficient. Increasingly, the work that separates a good finance professional from an average one isn't the calculation or the compliance check, it's the layer around it: the ability to read a business situation correctly, communicate a difficult finding clearly, hold an ethical line under commercial pressure, and adapt when the rules or the technology underneath the work shift again, which they will, faster than most training models are built to handle.
I think about this in terms of three shifts, because naming them makes the problem easier to plan for rather than just react to.
The first is the automation of the routine. Tasks that used to occupy the early years of a career, reconciliations, basic reporting, first-pass reviews, are increasingly handled by tools, not junior staff. That's not a loss. It's a redirection. But it means graduates now need to develop judgement earlier than they used to, because the work that's left for them is disproportionately the judgement-heavy work that used to come later in a career.
The second is the compression of the feedback loop. A regulatory change, a new reporting standard, a shift in what a client's board expects from an audit, these used to filter through slowly. Now they land fast, and the professionals who cope best aren't the ones who memorised the most, they're the ones who can absorb a change quickly, work out what it actually means in practice, and apply it without needing to relearn their whole approach.
The third, and the one I think is talked about least, is the rising cost of poor communication. Technical accuracy that can't be explained to a client, a board, or a regulator in terms they'll act on is technical accuracy that doesn't do its job. This isn't a soft skill in the dismissive sense of the term. It's one of the highest-value skills in the profession, and one of the least deliberately trained.
None of these three, judgement, adaptability, communication, are things a syllabus can hand someone by listing them as learning outcomes. They're built through structured exposure to real situations, repeated often enough and with enough feedback that they become instinct rather than effort.
This is where I think ACCA's approach has quietly kept pace better than people give it credit for. The qualification isn't just a technical curriculum with ethics bolted on as an afterthought. Professional skills and ethics run through it as a continuous thread, not a single module, and the emphasis on strategic thinking at the higher levels reflects a reasonably accurate read of where the value in this profession is actually moving. It won't manufacture judgement on its own, no qualification can, but it's built around the right list of things to be developing, not just the technical material that's easiest to test.
That's a large part of why the model at BDO Academy pairs ACCA's framework with practitioners actually doing the work day to day. The qualification sets out what future-ready looks like on paper. Whether someone actually gets there depends on how, and by whom, it's taught.
For years, the assumption in finance was straightforward: learn the technical material, keep it current, and you're set for a long career. That assumption is breaking down, and not for the reasons most people expect.
It's not that technical knowledge stops mattering. It's that technical knowledge is becoming necessary but no longer sufficient. Increasingly, the work that separates a good finance professional from an average one isn't the calculation or the compliance check, it's the layer around it: the ability to read a business situation correctly, communicate a difficult finding clearly, hold an ethical line under commercial pressure, and adapt when the rules or the technology underneath the work shift again, which they will, faster than most training models are built to handle.
I think about this in terms of three shifts, because naming them makes the problem easier to plan for rather than just react to.
The first is the automation of the routine. Tasks that used to occupy the early years of a career, reconciliations, basic reporting, first-pass reviews, are increasingly handled by tools, not junior staff. That's not a loss. It's a redirection. But it means graduates now need to develop judgement earlier than they used to, because the work that's left for them is disproportionately the judgement-heavy work that used to come later in a career.
The second is the compression of the feedback loop. A regulatory change, a new reporting standard, a shift in what a client's board expects from an audit, these used to filter through slowly. Now they land fast, and the professionals who cope best aren't the ones who memorised the most, they're the ones who can absorb a change quickly, work out what it actually means in practice, and apply it without needing to relearn their whole approach.
The third, and the one I think is talked about least, is the rising cost of poor communication. Technical accuracy that can't be explained to a client, a board, or a regulator in terms they'll act on is technical accuracy that doesn't do its job. This isn't a soft skill in the dismissive sense of the term. It's one of the highest-value skills in the profession, and one of the least deliberately trained.
None of these three, judgement, adaptability, communication, are things a syllabus can hand someone by listing them as learning outcomes. They're built through structured exposure to real situations, repeated often enough and with enough feedback that they become instinct rather than effort.
This is where I think ACCA's approach has quietly kept pace better than people give it credit for. The qualification isn't just a technical curriculum with ethics bolted on as an afterthought. Professional skills and ethics run through it as a continuous thread, not a single module, and the emphasis on strategic thinking at the higher levels reflects a reasonably accurate read of where the value in this profession is actually moving. It won't manufacture judgement on its own, no qualification can, but it's built around the right list of things to be developing, not just the technical material that's easiest to test.
That's a large part of why the model at BDO Academy pairs ACCA's framework with practitioners actually doing the work day to day. The qualification sets out what future-ready looks like on paper. Whether someone actually gets there depends on how, and by whom, it's taught.