Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance. The CFO role is changing rapidly, moving from cost controller to strategic visionary. And with every change comes opportunity. We are here to help you take advantage of this transition. to win at work, drive your career forwards, and lead with confidence.
Join Hannah Munro, Managing Director of ITAS, a financial transformation consultancy, as she interviews key experts to give you real-world advice and guidance on how to transform your processes, people, and data. Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance.
So hello everybody and welcome to this episode of CFO 4.0. With me today is Gareth John. He is the Executive Chairman, Director of Accountancy Training College at First Sin Tuition. He's also the President for ICAEW East Anglia. So welcome Gareth, lovely to have you on the show.
It's lovely to be here Hannah, thank you for the invite.
No, my pleasure. So do you want to just tell for our audience that may not have come across you and some of the organisations that you work with, do you want to just give me a bit of background about what you guys do at First Intuition?
Certainly so, I mean essentially we're a finance college so we train accountants. We train for the major accountancy qualifications, the AAT, ACCA, CIMA and ICAW qualifications. We do that all around the country and in fact a little bit overseas. We do it through classroom training and through online training, so we offer quite a wide variety.
We do it through apprenticeships and for non-apprenticeships we work with accountancy practices we also work with finance functions in commercial organisations, we work with NHS trusts, so quite a broad range actually, which is kind of great because, you know, me personally, quite a nice opportunity to sort of get a sense of what's going on in different parts of the kind
of accountancy and finance industry.
Absolutely, and tell me, how did you end up as president of the ICAEW? What's your journey?
Well, to be honest, I mean, I originally got into accountancy, if I'm perfectly honest, because I didn't really know what to do with myself when I was kind of in my early 20s. It was kind of strange when I was leaving university. My various friends seemed to have a very clear idea of what they wanted to do for careers, and I had no idea whatsoever.
But that's actually what appealed to me about accountancy, that, you know, I just figured every sector needs accountants every organization needs accountants every company needs accountants every country in the world needs accountants so actually by training as an accountant it was keeping my doors you know very much open keeping my options open meant i could perhaps choose at
a later date what i actually really wanted to come up commit myself for i also like the fact that as well as that breadth of careers accountancy offered it was also the kind of height of the career because i was conscious that you know right away from junior level ledger clerks or trainee auditors all the way up to board you know cfos or finance directors on
the main boards of ftse 100 companies were accountants so i just figured it really gave me all sorts of different opportunities and i actually trained i did training audit for for a national accountancy firm and that in itself was fantastic you know i'd go out to different clients every week or every fortnight you know looking at their books talking to their finance
teams sometimes getting factory tours And for me, it was a great way to see such a diversity of different types of business, different types of organizations. It was a great grounding, you know, as well as in accountancy itself. It was a great grounding in kind of the world of business and the world of commerce.
I'd always been quite interested in economics when I was younger, when I was at school and university. So, you know, for me, it was really a, you know, a whistle-stop tour of the world of business and how organizations ran.
and but as it turned out actually after i qualified myself as an accountant one of the things i've really loved about my own kind of training process and my own qualification process was the responsibility i've started taking on for training junior staff um internally at the firm that i worked with i got a real buzz out of that kind of interaction with juniors and
helping them ex understand tasks they were going to do so i moved myself into professional training um nearly 25 years ago now actually um and i've actually you know absolutely loved it ever since you know to say it's a job i've been doing for quarter of a century nearly i still still adore you know every day of what i do just the you know the reward you get
from helping other people through their own exams Helping them at a very early stage in their own careers.
For me, there's nothing like, particularly when I see former students going on to become partners or cfos of organizations you know to feel that you played a little role at the beginning of that career is just incredibly rewarding um and then about 11 years ago myself and a couple of colleagues we we sort of set up our first first intuition office um and you know
we've grown dramatically all around different parts of the country actually as i said so um it's been a you know really stressful at times but really exciting and rewarding journey and um you know i'm so glad i chose education as a sort of direction to take in my career
absolutely and uh you know quarter of a century is not bad to be very fair so so what have you seen over that that time frame have you seen the finance education change or has it you know has it changed that much since you first started
It's a really interesting question, actually, Hannah. In some respects, it's the same job as back when I started in the 1990s. It's fundamentally about helping ambitious individuals to start, hopefully, exciting careers in finance. Fundamentally, that's still what it's around.
But actually, in other ways, it's absolutely changed beyond recognition you know that's not just because we used to use old rattly overhead projectors and now we use computers so a little bit more to it than that i mean for instance you know a big change i've seen particularly in recent years is the real explosion of school leaver programs and you know back when i
got into accountancy um you know as i said 25 odd years ago you kind of needed a degree. The degree route, the graduate route into the accountancy profession was still by far and away the most common approach. Certainly I felt I needed a degree before I moved into accountancy and that's just not the case anymore.
We see more and more of employers that we work with who will recruit as many school leavers as they do graduates, sometimes even more school leavers.
In fact, I've got a few employers that I work with who they would rather take a school leaver, train them from scratch through some of the fundamental qualifications, and then up through maybe the higher level chartered qualifications.
They'd rather that than taking on a graduate who expects a higher salary, who expects really interesting work from day one, and perhaps doesn't really know anything for those years at university. So I think big, big growth in school leaver programs. Kind of linked to that actually is we've also seen a big growth in the use of apprenticeship programs.
You may be aware that a few years ago there was a shift from the old apprenticeship frameworks to the current apprenticeship standards, and they just made the appropriateness of apprenticeship programs so much broader.
I look at our typical intake at First Intuition, and if I go back five years perhaps five percent of our learners were apprentices you know if i look now it's probably 65 it's literally been that extreme of change and it's across the board now so all of the qualifications you know whether it's the aat or icaw sema acca whether it's School leavers, graduates now
can actually do apprenticeships, different age ranges. So, I think apprenticeships have been a really significant change over the last few years. There's a few other things as well. There's a much greater focus on ethics and sustainability within the training programs, within the qualifications themselves.
I think there's a recognition that accountants often, as well as being perhaps the financial compass of a business, sometimes also the moral compass of a business. and a part of the decision-making process, you know, beyond just whether something's going to make money or make profit, looking at whether it's the right thing to do.
And actually, I think, you know, the last few months, you know, this experience we've got of 2020 has probably really compounded the importance, I think, of those non-financial dimensions within business. So, you know, that's something that the various awarding bodies have been really stressing in recent years.
There's also been big changed in some of the practicalities of the way that students study you can imagine with technology changing um you know there's more online delivery and virtual delivery of training and of courses there's more online examining and in fact you know literally in recent months through the covert pandemic we've seen a shift towards remote invigilation ri
has become you know the big buzz phrase of the last few months so allowing students to actually sit exams at home or possibly in the office rather than going to a conventional traditional exam center so that's all facilitated through you can imagine you know webcams artificial intelligence biometrics and actually still having human invigilators watching through people's webcam
facilities and actually you can imagine in the last few months particularly that's been really useful to allow students to keep making progress with their exams, even when there are lockdowns or regional limitations on what people can do. But actually, that increasing use of technology for both the exams and the deliveries, it's got pros and cons.
It does increase flexibility and accessibility. The concern you sometimes find, particularly with students, is if students don't have a particular exam date to work towards, they sometimes don't really quite get round to sitting at the bane of my life is students saying, I'll book the exam when I'm ready.
I think back kind of to when I was a student, I was never ready to sit an exam, but I had to because it was a date in the calendar. And generally I got through them. I don't think anyone ever feels ready for their accountancy exams. And there's a danger with these on-demand computer-based exams that students just push them off, just delay, defer.
You know, I was talking to a student recently, you know, really frustrating for her. She was considering coming to us to study and she'd been studying the same subject for 18 months. Just had never quite felt ready to sit the exam and kept delaying, deferring, thinking I'll do a little bit more work.
And a year and a half, she'd been actually treading water and now kicking herself that she hadn't sat the exam. So there are potential downsides, I think, to the on-demand exams.
Absolutely. And in terms of the content, you mentioned ethics is a key driver and sustainability, which I think for a lot of businesses is becoming much bigger on the agenda. Is there anything else in terms of the way the content is changing, particularly for the upper levels of the exams, for those top level qualifications?
Yeah, I mean, you know, the content, the various awarding bodies, you know, they do work very hard to try and continually evolve their syllabuses, evolve the qualification content to make sure it is, you know, relevant, fit for purpose, to make sure it's going to keep employers fundamentally satisfied.
I mean, you know, CIMA as an example, they had a syllabus change last year where they brought in an awful lot of, you know, quite future-focused finance elements looking at kind of big data, looking at artificial intelligence, looking at blockchain, things that even four or five years ago, a lot of people would barely have heard of.
So all the institutes, they do try to move forward to introduce these new elements to their syllabuses. But fundamentally, actually, I think the basic skills that are trying to be developed in students are actually still quite similar.
Yes, they need to be aware of some new technical areas, but they still need to build skills in know analysis so being able to take a large scenario to make sense of it to break it down to to then look at potential problems in those scenarios so weighing up different options they could take some of which will have ethical dimensions which they'll have to bring in
and then fundamentally about decision making so coming up with a conclusion of what is it we should do in this situation And then the communications, actually making sure they can get over to whatever audience they have in their exam question, whether it be the board of directors or a client that they're reporting to, communicating all the distilled wisdom that they've
gone through in all of that analysis. And I think fundamentally, it's still skills that I still use to this day when I'm managing my business.
It's always interesting, Hannah, because I often encounter former students quite regularly They're often partners at firms we now work with, they're often on the board of businesses that we train for, and I often ask them the question, how much of what I taught you 10, 15, 20 years ago do you still use? And often they dismissively say, oh, hardly any of it.
But then they think, and they think and they say, well, actually, I might not use much of the technical material, but I use the way it trained me to think.
I use the way it trains me to approach problems and to analyze situations and to consider different stakeholder interests to make sure I'm adopting non-financial as well as financial agendas within the decision-making process. And that's the thing I always really love because my specialty tended to be those more strategic papers where there perhaps isn't one right answer.
And it's interesting, you know, you see some sort of higher level of some of the qualifications now. There sometimes isn't. huge amounts of actual real accounting there anymore. It's much more around strategy. It's much more around looking at risks in businesses, looking at the controls they need to manage themselves effectively.
Do you know what? That's a really great observation because one of the things we talk about a lot on the show is actually how that finance role is evolving. And I think it's such a shame that all these incredibly talented individuals that have been taught to think strategically are spending their time on what I would call mundane tasks.
And actually for me, that's the exciting piece and the shift that we're seeing when we're working with clients is how is technology allowing them to enjoy their role more by getting into the the bit that they've been trained for rather than the the bit they have to do to get the numbers out as it were so it's and i actually think that's a really big shift is
that shift to more of a strategic troubleshooting um sort of forward thinking you know risk assessment based um qualification rather than does this debit and this credit credit match there's almost a you know you have to know that but actually that's that's not the value of a of a finance person certainly not in um my eyes so it'd be great to understand so how are
you seeing that shift are you hearing that from the people that you're dealing with as well
i mean i think you're absolutely right there actually that
um
Obviously, there's a huge amount of automation that's coming into the accountancy process and the use of artificial intelligence. I look at our internal system. We use one of the cloud accounting platforms ourselves, and it automatically posts invoices without human interaction. It automatically reconciles our bank account. It's clever enough to do that without anybody helping.
And this is, I guess, the fear that people would have, is that therefore doing away with the job of accountant Is it, you know, are we going to be replaced by the boxes? Are we going to be replaced by the robots? But actually, to me, I don't think that's the case at all. I think it's just changing the job that accountants do.
It's taking away what fundamentally is pretty tedious, mind-numbing, repetitive transaction processing. The bit that always gave accountancy a pretty bad name, to be honest, it's replacing that and allowing us to do the more analytical side, the advisory stuff, the fun stuff, actually. I quite agree with you. For me, that's where the excitement and the interest really is.
I'm pretty sure no person decided to become an accountant to type numbers into spreadsheets. That was not part of the job description.
They sold this dream of being able to really drive businesses forward and help them um answer questions because that is finance is the place where you answer those questions and i i think it's fascinating the more people i speak to um on this podcast the more i start to see these shifts happening it's great to hear that the qualifications are actually now starting
to reflect that reality and what's happening so that's that's very exciting so um have you seen any other shifts in terms of you know what you're what you're being asked for any shifts in what people are using
well it's yeah i mean there's been a huge number of changes you know over over recent years um i mean the the kind of um you know clients i work with the kind of leaders that i talk to you know they do say that actually despite you know the widespread automation of transaction processing that we've talked about they do always stress that fundamental bookkeeping,
fundamental accountancy knowledge, still completely critical. Accountants, even though they may not be processing the transactions, they still need to understand what's going on. I know Mike Day, who's one of the directors at Xero, and he always uses the expression, they need to know what's going on under the bonnet.
They still need to understand their debits, their credits, their double entry. They still need to understand trial balances. They need to understand suspense accounts and germs. So that's not going away, even though perhaps the accountants aren't actually doing that work day to day in the workplace anymore.
You can imagine the analogy people tend to use is if something goes wrong and you've got to unpick it, You've got to understand what's going on in the first place. You need to understand how to post a journal to make the corrections.
And also I think, you know, to analyze the output of the systems, you know, the thing I often say is that whereas accountancy used to be a very input driven, that's much more output driven now. It's much more about taking the results of your system and making sense of it and communicating, you know, conclusions to either your own management team or to your client.
But to interpret that output, you've got to understand what was going on in inside it, I hear the phrase Often, you know, I was talking to a former student of mine recently, and she's FD of a small tech company now, doing really well.
And she said when she sits down with her CEO to explain how transactions work, they get their bits of paper out, they get the T-accounts out, and as she puts it, if in doubt, T-account, you know, literally to show, so when they're doing something like accruing income, you've got to show both impacts of it, and it makes sense, therefore, to use double entry
principles to show that as well as a P&L impact, there's also a balance impact so you know those fundamental skills still used by you know people at board level and in fact this to me is you know going back to that point around school leaver programs which we've seen a big growth of they would normally be done in conjunction with the AAT qualification and you
know as a technician qualification I think it's fantastic I've got a huge amount of respect for uh for the aet as a qualification because it really embeds those fundamental double entry skills those suspense account skills that you know literally those trainees might then still be using when they're a cfo many many years later you know if i'm you know if i'm teaching
a final level chartered or sema or certified class if i'm teaching students who are within weeks of qualifying as full professional accountants i can always tell the ones who did AAT versus the ones who came through the graduate route, even if they're relevant graduates, to be honest.
If I'm honest, I'm not sure what they're teaching on accountancy degrees these days because it doesn't appear to be double entry because you know you can always tell the students who did AAT because they still know what a journal is they can still post depreciation or whatever it might be so you know to see that that route you know school leaver route coming in
doing AAT using that as a springboard into one of the chartered qualifications doing it all through apprenticeships you know it's a five-year process you know you sometimes see fully qualified accountants at 23 perhaps even managers in their firms at that stage. I mean, it's such an incredibly powerful turbocharge at the start of people's careers, I think.
No, and to be fair, I have a lot of respect for the AOT qualification. We put our support guys, so people often say, you know, you're techies, you support accounting software. I'm like, no, no, no, we have to be good at both. And for us, that starts with the basics. So, you know, do they know the double entry?
you know, and can we put it, so we actually put our guys through. So I 100% support what exactly what you're saying. I'm a massive believer in, you've got to know the basics, you know, until you can't do the really interesting, you know, analysis until you actually got the basics. You might never use it, but you need to know it.
And I think that is the piece. So when you are looking at that P&L and the balance sheet, can you see where it's going wrong?
Because if you don't understand those tier counts, how are you, how on earth are you going to spot the differences because that for me is where, you know, the roles are starting to come in, is they're not spending their time entering this information, they're spending their time interpreting it.
And if you can't spot where things are going wrong, you know, you've got a big problem. So, yeah, no, 100%.
Those years I spent doing my own training and, you know, being an auditor particularly, and then, you know, now I teach double entries or something.
pretty familiar with it, but I've got this almost magical ability of, if I look at two pages of numbers, I can almost unnervingly spot where the issues are, and you can spot where something's gone a bit wrong, and it just becomes this kind of sixth sense.
Because it's something, particularly going back to this shift towards school leaver programmes, I often talk to 16, 17-year-olds who are considering careers in finance, and one of the number one questions that I get from them is, ooh, I'm not very mathematical, I'm not very good at maths, that means I can't be an accountant, doesn't it?
And I say, no, not at all, that doesn't matter. You do not need to be mathematical to be an accountant. Being numerate is no bad thing, so being able to play with numbers is great, but as long as you can add, subtract, multiply, divide, that's about as mathematical as accountancy tends to ever get.
I do homework with my 14-year-old daughter now, and she's doing stuff that's way more mathematically challenging than anything I teach my accountants.
Well, I'm going to be honest and say my background is mathematics. And I can honestly say I haven't learned, applied any, apart from the problem solving. Yeah, I didn't see a number for about three years when I did maths at university. It was all letters. So, you know, numbers don't really have much to do with maths at the top level. So we're all good.
Yeah, don't, you know, people shouldn't learn that bit of maths.
And I mean, even, you know, even that numerate side of it, when I was talking to one of my one of my recently qualified accountants recently. So she did, she was a school leaver, came straight in, did her qualifications, very successful.
She works at one of the big four firms, you know, just qualified as a full accountant and promoted to manager at a big four firm, and she is 23. It's an incredible achievement at a young age, and there's no way, and she even admits, there's no way she could have achieved that if she'd gone to university.
She'd probably only be about 18 months out of university at 23. But she said to me, actually, now that she'd been promoted to manager, she won't be doing much in the way of numbers anymore. It'll all be about people.
It'll all be about working with her team and training and support and communication, which, you know, going back to the point you were asking earlier about changes in kind of what accountants do, that I think is a big, big change.
And it feeds in with the apprenticeships that we mentioned that I think professional accountants are being called to draw on a far wider range of interpersonal skills at a much earlier age.
So, you know, a manager at 23, You know, I hear stories from clients who have, you know, they have school leavers who are talking to clients and advising clients within six weeks of leaving school. So, you know, 18, 19-year-olds who are giving clients face-to-face direct advice.
Again, you know, I remember when I was training, I mean, when I was a graduate, bear in mind, it was at least two years before they let me loose on talking to clients. You know, up until then, it was ticking bank statements and doing reconciliations and stuff. And, you know, so...
So I think the qualifications, the awarding bodies, the apprenticeships, which are fantastic for this, they need to deliver a much broader range of career-relevant skills than just the technical knowledge. In fact, I spent a lot of 2019 talking to employers and talking to the awarding bodies. I had Mark Farrar, who's the chief exec of the AAT.
He came to visit my office in Cambridge. And I set up a forum with a number of local employers who use AAT. And it was all about what skills do professional accountancy trainees need in their journey towards qualification. And the weird thing is nobody said accountancy. Nobody mentioned accountancy because that's kind of a given.
They assume they're going to know what a bank rec is and they're going to know what contribution is. It was all around skills.
communication teamwork adaptability you can imagine how important that's been in the last few months you know adaptability flexibility um decision making critical thinking leadership you know actually this this for me goes back to that you know To me, in 25 years of training accountants, the single biggest change by a country mile has been these new apprenticeship standards,
and particularly the skills and behaviors that they kind of overlay alongside the technical knowledge. And I think they're fantastic.
They're so fit for purpose for my vision of a future finance leader who, yes, has got to have the finance skills, but also needs a much broader array of leadership skills, which you know typically are not trained formally in the way that you know how to work at gross profit is or how to work out you know contribution is you know they get years of formal
training in that and then as we've heard by the age of 23 they're not doing it anymore and actually going to spend the rest of their career doing stuff they often don't get much in the way of formal training and so this is what i love about the apprenticeship programs is you know really embedding in a very robust very um i think reliable way all these other
skills and behaviors
do you know what i think that's a really good point and i loved your comment around you know how when you you know when you first started they didn't they hid you away from the clients for two years and you know because you were spending your time doing those tick box style tasks that are now being done by the technology and i and for me that's you know
It's exciting to learn that people are progressing faster because technology, people see technology as sort of a bad thing that it's going to take away jobs, but actually just creates different ones. But like you say, you've got to have those incredible sort of leadership communication skills that aren't.
traditionally, by the sounds of it, haven't been in the syllabus and that are now starting to creep through. And you mentioned apprenticeships are starting to get them in. Are the higher level ones actually starting to have an element of leadership, of conflict management, of people management as well?
Absolutely, you know, having difficult conversations with people. And, you know, they're right across the board. So, you know, apprenticeships basically consist of three key elements. There's knowledge, which is the sort of exam-focused technical stuff like working at profits or tax or whatever. You've then got the skills, which are these, I think, more broad career skills.
They're the things that are annoyingly always described as soft skills, which I hate that phrase. I really hate it. You know, soft skills makes them sound like they're not that important.
it makes them sound like they're kind of easy as i'm sure a lot of us would recognize the soft skills are the hard ones they're the really important ones that actually you know they're the ones that dictate the distance in your career i think you know if if you're banking if you're banking your finance career on being able to do bank recs and tax computations
you know you're already irrelevant, let alone in a few years' time. The distance of your career is dictated by your interpersonal skills, your negotiation skills, handling difficult situations, handling conflict, stakeholder management. And absolutely, so these are the skills that are in embedded in the apprenticeship standards.
And then you've got the behaviours and the behaviours really is all about making sure that the knowledge and the skills are actually adopted in the workplace and actually make a difference to how you behave and how you act in your jobs.
I'm sure you'll have had experiences like me, Hannah, where you go and do a day of training and it doesn't affect what you do at all because you go back to the workplace and you go back to the old ways that you've always done it.
So one of the things we do in our programs for apprentices as well as having the tutors that do the traditional job of teaching tax and net present value calculations we've got a whole new set of staff called coaches and they're actually responsible for the the apprentices where they're responsible for the learners development in all of these skills and behaviors so
making sure that they're taking them back to the workplace that they're given development tasks to you know so for instance if they've done their communication skills unit they'll go to the workplace and they'll run an internal meeting and make sure that they do a presentation or record it so it can be uploaded as evidence to show that it's actually making a difference
over the period of their programme to how they're able to work and therefore the value that they're delivering to their employers and a value that I think is the coming months are going to be challenging for businesses, for individuals, for the economy.
And these, I think, are the skills that are going to really make the difference to actually steering our local and national economies through the COVID recovery and the post-Brexit situation as well. We've got a lot to deal with. And I think these apprenticeship standards really give an awful lot of the core skills that are going to really help everyone.
And do you know what?
I think having had loads because this is one of the subjects I'm really passionate about so in terms of developing you know especially the young up-and-comings as it were both from because obviously we've got support staff got junior consultants coming through and one of the interesting things is that I think as the graduates and those young people so focused on getting
the piece of paper that demonstrates have the knowledge and the academic achievement and actually what they haven't quite got is that actually what the employees value is like you say those soft skills their ability to to communicate Thank you so much. We're starting to see those shifts because it isn't something that the finance profession is known for.
Let's be really honest. When somebody describes an accountant, what is it that they think of? And if we take that impression and then we actually take a step back and look at what you guys are delivering in terms of the quality of candidates, that's an amazing shift that actually you're more focused on the application of those skills in the workplace than you are.
They've got to have the technical, I don't think we're ever going to get away from that but actually it's really exciting to hear that there's such a shift in there in in the soft skills and there's got to be a better word for soft skills than um
we should have a competition i think because i quite agree i think they need renaming because you know you know it's like soft drinks it's a bit kind of fluffy and meaningless
isn't
it yeah and then not at all i mean you know and the thing is i look back at my career and you know when i was training If I was lucky, I got one day a year where I went off to a country house with all my colleagues and you'd get told if you were red, green, or blue, and then you'd play some games.
It was a bit of a token gesture for all this interpersonal stuff. With these new apprenticeship standards, these new programs, it's really embedded as part of those programs from the very, very start. I did an interesting exercise with a client recently.
A client had their auditors in and they knew that the auditors had recently started adopting apprenticeships and they knew some of the audit team were apprentices and some weren't.
And the FDO I was chatting to, he'd done a little exercise with himself as he tried to guess which of them were apprentices and which of them weren't just by the way they carried themselves, the way they communicated, the confidence that they showed. And he said he got it bang on when he actually talked to them afterwards. He got it bang on.
He could tell which of them were apprentices and they weren't necessarily the most experienced or the oldest at all. In fact, some of them were relatively new school leavers who, you know, and to me, that's the other thing.
It's not just the specific career skills, if we can call them career skills rather than soft skills, but it's not just the specific skills they're getting in things like team working, negotiation, you know, problem solving.
It was the kind of professional confidence they were building because the apprenticeships, as I've said, you know, they have tasks, so they have to go and demonstrate these in the workplace and they get feedback. And apprenticeships also involve a huge amount of sort of self-review.
You know, you're supposed to know reflect on what you do regularly to see you know you know we all know reflection on how we're performing and identifying what we could do better and what we do differently. We know that's a fundamental part of learning, but we just never have time to do it, do you? You never sit down.
But apprentices are kind of forced to do it as part of their programmes. And that alone, I think, makes a powerful difference to the progression they make, the fact they are kind of constantly reflecting on what they need to do to improve.
And it's great to hear that the next generation of finance leaders are coming through with those skills.
But what about those that have already completed their CMA or you know and I've done the old syllabus that didn't necessarily contain all this great um you know people people skills and core competencies in the workplace what is there anything that's being done to support those that want to sort of engage and outside of that or are they going down the alternative
route of you know sort of CMI etc
well I mean there is always CPD you know and CPD you know it's you know, I think it's becoming clearer and clearer every year. And this year is a very good example that, you know, I forget who said it, but somebody once said the day you're done learning, you're done.
You know, you've got to constantly keep learning, you know, even at my age and at my position, you've got to keep learning new stuff.
And so, you know, CPD is, you know, what you need it to be in your situation in your workplace in your business so you know for a lot of people that cpd will be almost trying to incorporate some of the elements that you know young learners are getting as part of their programs you know you mentioned cmi actually and it's one of the things we've developed at
first intuition in the last couple of years is we're starting uh to roll out a leadership management program in conjunction with the cmi uh so we've got a level three and a level five program which you know we have apprentices doing that because you know we are seeing so many of our you know newly qualified accountants being promoted into positions of responsibility
at very young ages and need that support and training so for us it's fantastic it gives us an opportunity to you know if we've had a school either from 17 up to 23 through their accountancy journey we can now take them another year or two through their initial leadership journey.
So, I know a lot of organizations are starting to take formal training in areas like leadership and management with a CMI or some of the other leadership institutes that is being taken a lot more seriously. But I do think, organizations clearly have a role to play in making sure their various staff are upskilled in the right way.
But it's something individuals, you know, you've got to take this very seriously. I was actually on the conference call with the CBI earlier and they were saying they've done some research that shows that nine out of 10 employees in the country will need some form of pretty significant reskilling in the next decade.
So basically all of us So I think every single one of us needs to take a big responsibility for our own development, whether that be leadership skills, digital skills, which are clearly going to be very relevant to an awful lot of roles going forward. But we've got to be proactive and take that responsibility ourselves, I think.
No, absolutely. And I think there is a bit of ownership, isn't there, on individuals within a team? to make sure that they know where they want to go. Because that's always the hard bit, especially when they're a bit younger, is actually figuring out what's coming next.
So for those that are running teams or have a team and they're wanting to think, right, this is my team for the next five years, what are your top tips for making sure that they have the skills to actually drive that finance team forwards?
Well, I think firstly, in the short term, don't be tempted to cut back on recruitment at entry level, which I think would be a natural knee-jerk reaction to a situation like this. But I've been very reassured actually in recent months that the employers I work with have all carried on with their pre-COVID recruitment plans.
In fact, a lot of them have referenced the 2008-09 financial crash when a lot of people did cut back recruitment dramatically and actually really suffered for it four or five years later when they didn't have effectively an entire generation of newly qualified senior staff. In fact, I know organizations that are still suffering now at senior progression level.
You know, they can't find the partners, that they should have recruited back in 2008, 9. So a lot of organizations have said, right, we don't repeat that mistake.
So we are still going to bring in those entry level school leavers because fundamentally, you know, a school leaver, particularly if they're being trained under an apprenticeship, it's not a massive cost to the business at the end of the day. You know, the bigger costs would be not having those staff a few years down the line.
So I think firstly, you know, don't be tempted to cut back recruitment in the short term because you may well regret it in the medium to long term.
I think building a robust school leaver program, the sort of thing we've been talking about, using the likes of AAT, use the AAT qualification to build those fundamental double entry skills as fundamental knowledge that we've already been talking about a bit earlier.
I think part of that school leaver program is having positive engagement with local schools, local colleges, which perhaps a lot of organizations have not really done in the past it's actually something we've been drawn into much more at first intuition is you know much stronger relationships with schools for careers fairs and recruitment events which really we didn't tend to
do a few years ago um you know we talked a bit about apprenticeships but i think you know using the apprenticeship programs to support trainees and in an accountancy you can do that from kind of level two to three to four to seven so you can take the whole range from school leaver all the way up to fully qualified chartered accountant so a good solid engaged
apprenticeship program with a good training provider i think would be a really necessary part of that um within that training program i think you know what i see a lot of the more successful programs doing is having a degree of trainee rotation around different parts of the organization.
So rather than staying in one silo for three or four years, actually moving around maybe a few months in different parts of the business, because particularly to imagine when somebody gets higher up in the organization, that kind of more holistic organizational familiarity of all the different parts of the business really helps if they're then trying to run you know the
whole shooting match rather than think well i've only ever really worked in purchase ledger or i've only ever worked in treasury so i think you know rotation is really good for building those future leader leader potential um and you know clearly you don't want to put all this effort into recruiting school leavers putting them on apprenticeship programs training them
through their AAT, through their chartered qualifications, and then them leave. So I think a real focus on retention after qualification is obviously critical to then retaining their ability, their skills.
So, you know, That would include, I guess, things like making sure there are good career progression paths, having mentoring with some of the senior leaders of the organisation, obviously recognising people's achievements, giving them autonomy and decision-making power in what they're doing, giving them challenging and rewarding work to keep them interested, a bit like I've had for
25 years now at First Intuition, and perhaps fundamentally a sense of purpose.
in what they're doing you know both for their own job but also for the organization i think you know the the younger generations these days are much more interested in a sense of um belonging to an organization with a you know a bigger purpose than just themselves so i think you know all of those things hopefully ensure that you retain that talent that you've
invested so heavily in building at the beginning of their careers and they will you know in fact i was talking to a one of the partners of the firm we work with who really loves apprenticeships and really embraced it.
And she put it quite succinctly, which was, we're not training accountants, we're developing future leaders, which I thought said it in a nutshell, really.
I think it does, actually. And that's a great way to sum up what a finance training programme should be. It's not developing accountants, it's building the finance leaders of the future. And I think there's always that piece that should be in the back of any leader's mind at the moment is how do I build the people that are going to replace me?
Because if you have that amazing team underneath you, you are going to go far. And that's a brilliant way to sum up the podcast. So thank you so much, Gareth. It's been really insightful. And if our audience wants to learn more about what you do at First Intuition, what's the best way to sort of reach out and get hold of you?
I mean, we have a website, so www.firstintuition.co.uk, or you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn, continually posting around what's going on with apprenticeships, what's going on with the qualifications, my view on challenges in regional economies. So just look for Gareth John, look for probably a silly shirt, and feel free to link with me.
I love building my LinkedIn community.
absolutely and I think because that is exactly where I found you I must admit the silly shirt caught the attention as it should we've
got to have a personal brand
haven't you absolutely and for anyone that's listening that wants to reach out we will put your LinkedIn profile and a link to your website in the show notes so listen obviously have a look at those guys and do connect in and you've got some great content coming out so thank you Gareth for joining us it's been lovely to have you on the show
thank you for inviting me it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you you today
thanks for listening and i hope you enjoyed this episode i actually have a favor to ask reviews and shares are incredibly important to the success of any podcast if you could spare a minute to share this episode on your social network or leave us a comment to tell us what you liked i would really appreciate it feel free to tell me what topics interest you most
i would really love to hear your feedback Don't forget to check out our latest CFO 4.0 webinar on budgeting and planning in a volatile environment. Click the link in the show notes or visit www.itassolutions.co.uk and click on our events page for more info and great content.
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