The key skills for financial technologists: development isn’t high on the list
If you’re a technologist working in the financial sector, it’s never just been about the technical skills. Yes, you need to understand programming languages, but this has to be combined with knowledge about particular asset classes or financial sector domains. The main thing firms want from their IT staff now, though, is that they’re business savvy.
The most ‘critical’ skill needed to work with in IT within the banking and securities industry is the ability to ‘align business and technology goals’, according to a new survey by Information Week and Bank Systems and Technology. This is followed by ‘integrating enterprise applications’ and ‘collaborating with internal stakeholders’. As the table below shows, developing applications comes pretty far down the list of skills.
Paul Bennie, managing director of IT in finance headhunters Bennie MacLean, says that lower down that ranks it’s rare that a bank will recruit at technologist without an understanding of how IT will fit into business needs, but at the senior end it’s moving the other way.
“Banks want to recruit people at executive director and above who have an understanding of the operational issues, can manage outsourcing projects and think strategically about technology, but they also need a technical background,” he says. “They don’t just want managers any more – most senior recruits have a background in development or engineering and need to understand the technical requirements of the systems their teams are developing.”
Perhaps one of the reasons that business knowledge is so integral is that that ‘core’ technology functions are increasingly being outsourced. Nearly, 70% of people surveyed said that their company had outsourced IT jobs, and 66% of lower level employees cited this as a reason that fewer IT jobs were available now.
Nearly 55% of staff believe that the career path in financial IT isn’t as promising today as it was five years ago. This is an improvement on 2010, though, when 66% believed job and pay prospects had diminished.
