Searching for satisfaction
A recent survey reveals that over half of financial professionals are actively seeking a new job. With employers complaining of a serious skills shortage but be ing reluctant to take on new staff, where does this leave the industry? Accounting Technician takes a look at the figures
Overworked, stressed, despondent and underpaid. Those are words that can be used to describe employees in the finance sector who were highlighted in the Spring 2005 Salary and Benefits survey, conducted by Robert Half Finance & Accounting. A total of 2,160 finance professionals throughout the UK responded to the financial recruiter's survey and the findings are worrying.
The past couple of years have seen financial organisations actively scale back their recruitment drive, leading to serious understaffing within the industry at all levels. Part-qualified (29 per cent) and qualified (26 per cent) financial professionals have been most affected by the recruitment cull, followed by senior (18 per cent) and graduate (17 per cent) roles. As a result, employees are under constant stress and pressurised to work longer and longer hours (24 per cent work a 50-hour week) in order to make up the shortfall.
The figures speak for themselves: 44 per cent of employee respondents believe that their company is understaffed and 60 per cent of those holding this view feel that their workloads have increased as a result.
The survey reported an average working week for a finance professional of 42 hours, four and a half hours longer than the national average and an increase of one hour on the figure established by last year's survey. With this in mind, the survey found that over half (51 per cent) of financial professionals are actively or passively looking for a new job ?¬Å¡¬€?¬Ã…€? an alarming, yet unsurprising, statistic which could see serious repercussions throughout the finance industry.
If half of the respondents are intent on leaving their current jobs and employers are complaining of a huge skills shortage - 42 per cent of organisations reported that finding staff with the necessary skills and experience proved difficult - where does that leave HR departments?
Recruiters searching for candidates in the near future will be confronted with two main challenges:
- identifying candidates with the necessary skills and experience; and
- providing terms and conditions attractive enough to secure the right candidate and, more importantly, to retain them.
The impact of accountancy scandals, such as Enron, identified a skills shortage in auditing. Consequently, a greater demand was placed on auditing, IT and governance skills in order to meet the increasing reporting requirements and the growing importance of technology in modern business.
The survey found business management skills (23 per cent) to be the most lacking. Accountants looking for career diversification should take note as the profession is a "great grounding for business roles", said Steve Carter, Managing Director of Robert Half Finance & Accounting. Skills shortages were also found in IT/IS (16 per cent), auditing (12 per cent) and Sarbanes-Oxley (6 per cent).
Carter had these words of warning for organisations hoping to supplement their existing workforce: "Prospective churn rates of these proportions are concerning. Acertain amount of staff turnover is inevitable, and necessary to fuel the market. However, when more than half the workforce is job-hunting, it is essential that companies look hard at what they offer their staff... companies that don't react to this will find it difficult to recruit and keep top talent."
On the bright side, despite obvious discontent, respondents seemed happy to socialise with work colleagues outside of working hours, indicating that the distinction between friends and work colleagues is disappearing - 55 per cent of respondents had socialised with colleagues at the weekend, at least once or twice.
