Industry insights on skills needs
The Financial Services IRC’s 2019 Skills Forecast suggests the top priority skills for the Banking and General Financial Services sector include health and safety skills, teamwork and communication, and problem solving skills. This is in addition to sector specific technical and multi-disciplinary skills. The top three generic skills focus primarily on soft skills including customer service, critical thinking, and learning agility. Data analysis is rated as the fourth most important generic skill for the sector.
According to the job vacancy data, the top generic skills requested by employers were communication skills and building effective relationships. The most advertised occupations were Bank Workers followed by Information Officers. The top employers were the big four banks and Macquarie Group.
According to the above Skills Forecast, as with many sectors across the economy, emerging technologies are significant in shaping the future of the Banking and General Financial Services sector. FinTech innovations are changing the services provided by the sector, as well as leading to the automation of many process-oriented roles and enabling more financial services in the gig and shared economies.
Many technological advancements in the Banking and General Financial Services sector are aimed at giving the consumer more knowledge and control of transactions and services, and the ability to conduct services for themselves. These technologies include:
- Internet and mobile banking, allowing customers to manage their funds without going to a branch, with the majority of Australians now making a purchase or banking transaction on their mobile.
- Peer-to-peer lending, as a method of debt financing that enables individuals to borrow and lend money without an official institution.
According to the Skills Forecast, workers in the Banking and General Financial Services sector will need the following skills:
- Core financial multi-disciplinary skills, which are the financial literacy, capacity and industry knowledge skills that underpin all roles in the Financial Services industry.
- Enterprise skills, such as teamwork, communication, problem solving, and work health and safety skills that are about 'how' a worker operates in the workplace.
- Flexibility and resilience skills, which will continue to be extremely important for workers adapting to technological change.
- Communication and other skills where humans generally have a competitive advantage over machines.
In a world where technology is rapidly changing the banking experience, making it more convenient, more mobile and more transparent than ever before, strong, ethical banks remain critical to customer trust and confidence.
The 2021 Starling report, Culture and Conduct Risk in the Banking Sector: Why It Matters and What Regulators Are Doing to Address It, highlights that sustainable performance requires resilience and shared purpose around competence, reliability, responsiveness, accountability, openness, respect and honesty. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for the sector.
The objective of the Australian Financial Markets Association’s Framework for Industry Conduct Training is to assist participants in Australia's wholesale banking and financial markets to enhance the professionalism of staff through designing and implementing effective conduct employee training programs. Conduct training is training in ethics and compliance-related topics that is designed to minimise the risk for an organisation of becoming involved in practices that contravene laws, industry standards and organisational values. Hence, the purpose of conduct training is to influence and guide the behaviour of staff.
Committed to building a workplace that is as diverse as it is dynamic, the National Australia Bank (NAB) partnered with DXC Technology to establish the Neurodiversity at NAB program. NAB believes that to achieve true competitive advantage in the technical world, it is essential to have a diversity of thinking and culture within its teams. The intent of the program was to embed diversity and inclusion into the culture and fabric of the bank through the employment of people on the autism spectrum. Based on the DXC Dandelion Program, the Neurodiversity at NAB program provides a holistic employment experience that offers benefits to both the participating individuals and the private sector. It provides an opportunity for businesses to address IT talent shortages by harnessing the unique skill sets that often come with autism. These skills include an extraordinary capacity for visual thinking and comfort with routine and systematically oriented activities. Other typical traits are honesty, as well as the ability to pay close attention to detail and identify errors. For individuals on the autism spectrum, the program provides an opportunity to develop technical and social skills to obtain long-term, meaningful employment in the technology field.
The National Skills Commission’s Skills Priority List: June 2021, lists the occupation of Finance Manager as having ‘Strong’ future demand and Bank Worker as having ‘Moderate’ future demand. Research has not identified any significant difficulty filling vacancies for these occupations across Australia, except in New South Wales and the Northern Territory where there is a current shortage of Bank Workers.
