In Investment Firm of the Future, we positioned good culture and effective mechanisms to support personal growth as key parts of future success.
Investment firms are people businesses in which talent is intrinsic to success. The factors that secure talent include compensation, but intrinsic motivations often are more significant. These include: autonomy—people like to have flexibilities and clear levels of discretion in their work; mastery—people like to develop deeper skills; purpose—people like work that is meaningful to them; recognition—people like their work to be recognized and appreciated; and good colleagues—people like talented and empathetic colleagues, as well as a sense of belonging.xxxix
In Exhibit 21, just over 60% of industry leader survey respondents expect firms to increase the amount of training and development they offer in the next 5–10 years; this number is lower in the Americas than in Asia Pacific or EMEA.
The demand for more learning conducted at a faster pace is one factor at play. The bar for quality training and development programs keeps rising. Organizations recognize that they need to continuously upskill professionals to remain effective. Providing employees with ongoing learning opportunities improves the quality of analytical work and client engagements and helps the firm retain its best people and build a stronger bench of talent. Those people who develop a deep expertise stay longer with the organization because their key development needs are being met.
Learning and development will no doubt travel in new directions beyond enhancing technical and leadership skills to improving growth mindset and developing new knowledge and skills. The use of online collaborative courses will increase, in which new technologies will be critical. This shift will be complemented by increased access to university business courses.
Investment professionals are highly motivated by learning new things and prioritize learning alongside having interesting work and competitive compensation and benefits. In the member and candidate survey, we asked about the factors that motivate professionals most in their work and, separately, which of these items, if inadequate, is most likely to make them leave a job. These results by gender are illustrated in Exhibit 22. For women, no items were revealed as “essential” to attract them into the industry and retain them. This presents a challenge for investment firms: There is no generic approach that will be successful because there is limited uniformity among women about what motivates and retains them.
