How to prepare recent graduates for the controlling and bookkeeping jobs of today and tomorrow?

In my experience, there is a fairly large mismatch between what students learn and what is needed in a profession as a bookkeeper or controller.

As business processes become more intricate, finance functions require specialized and in-depth expertise. Additionally, the retirement of the baby boomer generation has resulted in younger individuals assuming greater responsibilities faster.

In contrast to these more complex business needs, schools compete more and more to attract students. Consequently, the study programs are primarily attractive to the students, but not necessarily in line with the needs of the corporate world. In addition, in a lot of Economic Master’s programs, there is no (mandatory) internship.

From that perspective, it is not surprising that a lot of our freshly graduated consultants report that their first days on the job are a solid culture shock.

The challenge

This situation means a tough challenge in terms of Learning & Development. Training recent graduates now is not just limited to updating the finance knowledge they acquired during their studies or learning to work with some new tools. Upskilling in this context is about learning and applying broad finance concepts such as month-end processes, a whole range of soft skills such as (indirect) leadership and persuasive communication and even stimulating desirable behaviour such as taking initiative and problem-solving. Things you just can’t teach with mandatory e-learnings.

Controlling Academy and Finance & Administration Academy

At TriFinance, we have recently rolled out two Academies for our consultants with a few years of experience: Controlling Academy for consultants who aspire to become controllers and the Finance & Administration Academy for consultants with an ambition in Finance Management.

These academies were created to be a natural sequel to our Young Graduate Program. Our Young Graduate Program trains our recent graduates in technical finance skills, SAP, Excel and people skills, over the course of 1,5 years. After this program, we help our consultants to shape their own destination within Corporate Finance. For this, they can use our skills framework which contains over 50 predefined roles in Corporate Finance.

We found that this large amount of possibilities to choose from made it difficult for some of our consultants to decide on their next career step. That is why we created two follow-up academies based on the type of roles that are in the highest demand.

For the setup of the academies, we wanted to focus on the social aspect of learning. Within our network organization, we want to connect people with similar interests and ambitions to form communities where these colleagues can share experiences and learn together. That means bringing them physically to the classroom at our offices.

At the same time, we can’t lose track of the return of learning. Therefore we try to blend asynchronously as much as possible, mix it up with shorter forms like lunch & learn webinars and more workshop-style approaches for soft skill training.

We also try to find the optimal mix between external and internal trainers. External trainers ensure that our subject matter is up-to-date (i.e. tax related subjects), while internal trainers guard that the contents can be translated to the workflow of a consultant, ideally the very next day. Those internal trainers are senior consultants who can share their best practices and act as role models for the career development of the trainees.

A long history of upskilling efforts

We are not the only company that is facing these challenges. Upskilling once again tops the L&D global sentiment survey as the most important challenge for this year, ahead of hot topics like analytics and AI. Upskilling has been a hot topic for years now. In the 1980s, large companies such as General Electric invested in their own universities to provide broad business education to their staff. Once the Internet became established, they decided to close those physical universities and replace them with a cheaper virtual version.

Anyone who has ever had to wrestle through a GDPR e-learning knows the pitfall of this form of learning: it is boring, takes too long and all too often not practical enough. That's why in the following years, L&D was looking for the optimal "blend" between physical and digital learning moments. Just think of initiatives like "Flipping the classroom." Internet quality improved and streaming became the norm. Meanwhile, a huge amount of learning resources became available online. YouTube has been number one for several years as the favourite tool for learning for a lot of people, and for good reason.

Today, self-directed microlearning is the norm in many organizations. The benefits are clear: employees don’t have to spend an entire day in a training room without getting to their actual tasks and they can find the information themselves pretty quickly thanks to the magic of the search button. Moreover, they can apply what they have learned in practice immediately after learning. This ensures that the results show up pretty quickly in your operational KPIs. So, the ROI of microlearning is high and you can roll it out quickly and scalable in your organization, which means you'll sell these solutions fairly quickly within your organization. But what about the deeper development of your staff? The things you don't learn by watching a 5-minute video?

We believe that companies that face similar challenges, could benefit from our Academy approach. An Academy is basically a training program that usually takes several years to complete with the goal of addressing your staff's skill gaps, fully aligned with the organization's goals. That means it often starts by identifying those gaps through assessments to then apply a blend of work formats ranging from classic classroom training to digital and social learning along with more experienced colleagues. The content and blend of work forms are completely determined by what your organization needs on a strategic level. Meanwhile, participants form a community that puts the knowledge into practice and shares their experiences with each other and the academy organizers. The latter is a crucial feedback loop that ensures that the program continues to evolve along with the needs of the business.

For us, this is an answer to the tight labour market in our sector and we can only confirm the benefits described above. The result is solidly trained consultants who are highly motivated to apply their knowledge immediately on the shop floor.