Our expert panel

Victoria McDonald, VP Talent & Organizational Development, TD Bank
Jane Evans, Managing Director, Leadership Development, BMO
Rosemary Li-Houpt, VP Talent Acquisition, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board
Michelle Banik, Senior Vice President, HR Centres of Excellence, Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System
Dan Saroff, Senior Resources Manager, CIBC Wealth
Jessica Pezim, Senior Manager, Campus Programs, CIBC World Markets
Eleanor McIntyre, Chief Operating Officer, BlackRock Canada

On April 24th, the Continuing Education and Career Management Committees hosted a Talent Management Roundtable along with recruiting and human resources representatives from many of the largest employers of CFA charterholders. Their overarching message was that technical skills such as those of the CFA designation are a great foundation for a career in capital markets, but like other professionals, charterholders must continue to develop their skills to remain commercially relevant to employers.

Put another way, a hammer is necessary to be a good carpenter, but it’s far from sufficient. Roundtable participants offered the following specific suggestions.

Whether it’s in your title or not, everyone is a salesperson. This means keeping a relentless focus on the challenges your firm’s clients are facing and what your organization could be doing to solve them. Once you’re clear on what will help the client, the key to advancement is connecting your role to the solution.

Understand what’s going on in the world around you. Have an opinion about it and be able to articulate it in a way that is relevant to your audience. Remember, there are two key audiences: external (clients) and internal (peers and superiors).

Actively look for opportunities to use your technical skills to solve problems. Do this for a client or within your own organization (e.g., developing new products, creating efficiency, mitigating risk). Actuaries with management consulting experience are in demand. They not only have great technical skills, but consulting also develops the ability to translate data into a recommendation that’s relevant for the business.

You don’t need to be an executive or even in the front office to add value from a selling mindset. Junior people can forge relationships with their counterparts in client organizations. They will be running the place in 10 years, and they’ll remember that you took time for them when they were starting out. Also, seek out opportunities to collaborate with peers in other divisions of your firm. This can reveal opportunities to develop innovative solutions to clients’ problems. Back office people can also add value by connecting with their counterparts in client organizations. Business is won by understanding the full range of the clients’ pain points, and considering operational details may be just the thing that differentiates your firm and clinches the deal.

Be relentlessly curious about key factors in other peoples’ success, looking beyond just the titles on their CV. Listen for stories about the following:

• How they got each role
• What they learned
• Relationships they built
• Mistakes they made and how they recovered from them

Actively cultivate self-awareness to understand what your true development areas are. Just as most people rate themselves to be a better-than-average driver, most employees overestimate their professional capabilities in one area or another. If your career isn’t progressing the way you want, there’s probably a reason. Find out what it is. Here are some things to try:

• Complete a personality assessment instrument (e.g., DiSC, Myers-Briggs, Herrmann Brain Dominance) and discuss the results with your manager or another trusted colleague.
• Invest in a few sessions with an executive coach that specializes in capital markets.
• Take an acting or improvisation class. Nothing will help you understand yourself better than pretending to be someone else.

Use the inputs from the personal assessment above to develop a clear understanding of how you currently approach your role and how you might improve. Only by having a methodology for creating, checking, and enhancing your work can you continue to improve. Ask yourself the following:

• How do I approach a project or a task?
• Where do I hit obstacles?
• What approach do I use to overcome obstacles?
• Where do I look for new inputs to take my work to the next level in a way that helps my client (internal or external) be more successful?

Don’t wait for your employer to create a development plan for you. Take ownership of your own career and actively seek out experiences that will give you new perspective on how change could impact your business:

• Develop a business plan for your role that connects what you do each day to the bottom line.
• Don’t overlook lateral moves. They will allow you to develop new skills, gather institutional knowledge, and improve your professional judgement, all of which will make you more valuable to your employer. It is particularly important to be open to lateral moves that might expose you to other regions/countries because organizations want their leaders to absorb and share best practices.
• Develop your network by having one coffee a week with each of the following: someone outside your organization, someone more senior than you, and someone more junior than you. Getting involved in industry associations can be a great way to make these contacts. Also, be sure to cultivate ties with people outside the industry. This will help you identify externalities that could impact your business.
• Don’t overlook the interpersonal aspects of your development plan (see above).
• Earn a mentor. Mentorship is a key part of career development, but mentees must demonstrate that they have core attributes that the organization will benefit from developing. Solicit interest from potential mentors by creating a draft development plan that is linked to your organization’s goals and ask executives with whom you interact for their input.

Never forget that ethical standards come through in everything you do. While recruiters may not ask what you would do if faced with a specific ethical dilemma, be aware that most people are evaluating your ethical standards in subtle ways, and their impressions form an important part of the candidate profiles that are completed by most recruiters.

The great news is that organizations are on the hunt for talent and are particularly challenged to find mid-level people with the potential to grow into the leaders of the future. Investing in training and personal development that rounds out your technical tool kit has a good chance of delivering the results you’re looking for.