Wrestling with Your Digital Talent Gap
By Robert McGarvey
Wake up to a frightening reality: very probably your credit union is falling behind in the race for digital talent and that just may be a sound of impending doom.
Consulting firm CapGemini, working with LinkedIn, recently issued a report on The Digital Talent Gap and the takeaways for credit union executives have to be frightening.
According to CapGemini, six in ten banking executives acknowledge they face a widening talent gap. The report pinpoints banking as a sector where that gap is especially high.
The money center banks, almost certainly, are not pointing to themselves. They are busily hiring top digital talent as they chart their paths into a 21st century where digital is seen as the core of banking. They see that future and they are preparing for it.
Down a checklist, CapGemini sees less skill than is needed in a range of digital activities that are central to banking today. Included on the list are cybersecurity, mobile apps (where a big skill deficit is cited), data science, and big data (another huge deficit).
A lot of what has become core in delivering financial services is now emerging as areas where many, many credit unions and community banks are just not keeping up because they don’t have the talent to stay in the game.
Employees know these realities. According to the survey data, 30% of banking employees believe their skills will be redundant in one to two years. 44% believe their skills will be redundant in four or five years.
That suggests a frightened, anxious workforce.
Employees also express dissatisfaction with trainings offered them by their organization. 45% say they are not helping them attain new skills. 42% say the trainings they attend are “useless and boring.”
Ouch.
Question: does your credit union leadership know their own employees fear their institution is lagging in the race for digital competence – and that they despair over the viability of their own skills?
It gets worse. You just may lose the digital talent you presently have. The CapGemini survey found that “over half of digital talent (55%) say they are willing to move to another organization if they feel their digital skills are stagnating.”
The good news: CapGemini offered concrete suggestions about what organizations need to do to remain players in the race for digital talent.
A suggestion not on the list is blunt: credit unions often will need to find their digital talent through third party vendors and CUSOs. No shame in that. At a certain institutional size, the savvy survival strategy is to know where to go outside to help chart the credit union’s digital path. There still needs be digital skills internally – especially a sharp sensitivity to what matters digitally inside the c-suite. But a lot of the digital heavy lifting can and should happen through third parties at all but the very largest credit unions.
But the biggest credit unions need to be sure they are nurturing internal digital talent. And smaller institutions need to know what they can do with the talent they have and they also need to stay watchful of their third party vendors and their talent development efforts.
Just because a CUSO was spot on technologically in 2010 doesn’t mean it has a clue today. Things move very fast in this world.
That’s where the CapGemini suggestions about how to develop digital talent come in.
And step one is Attract Digital Talent where CapGemini points a finger at the institution’s leadership. Specifically: “Align leadership on a talent strategy and the unique needs of digital talent.”
How does your credit union measure up there?
Does your leadership see the ultimate importance of digital in charting the institution’s future?
The next steps are no easier: “create an environment that prioritizes and rewards learning” and “align leadership on a talent strategy and the unique needs of digital talent.”
Digital warriors go where they are loved and wanted. It’s that simple.
One more step: “Give digital talent the power to implement change.”
This doesn’t sound easy?
Nope. It all is very hard, especially for small and mid size credit unions.
But the alternative just may be planning to go out of business.
That makes the choice easy.