Resilience is our capacity to recover, to bounce back, from challenges and misfortune. It implies emotional strength and grit, an ability to confront and overcome the barriers that stand between us and our goals.
The coronavirus pandemic has tested that resilience, both our personal resilience as investment professionals and the operational resilience of our firms.
In uncertain times like these then, it is critical that we focus on and strengthen our professional resilience. The question is how.
At a basic level, we develop career resilience when we acquire and sharpen our skillsets, grow our experience, and leverage our career opportunities. This should help protect us from professional setbacks and ensures our professional longevity. And hopefully as our careers advance, we build our financial resilience in parallel as a safeguard against unexpected expenses and financial reversals.
But that’s the broad view. For a more granular perspective on career resilience, its essential components, and how it could evolve as professional roles, skills, and working environments change in the years ahead, CFA Institute produced Investment Professional of the Future. The study was compiled from surveys of 3,800 CFA Institute members and exam candidates, qualitative roundtable discussions with 130 industry leaders in major global cities, and interviews with human resources and recruiting specialists.
The responses surfaced some compelling takeaways.
To stay resilient in an era of continuous and fast-accelerating change, we have to become more agile and adaptable. Of the industry leaders surveyed, 89% said “individuals’ roles will be transformed multiple times during their careers; adaptability and lifelong learning will be the most essential skills.”
The present crisis, with its abrupt shift to a new normal, has forced us to face this reality head on. We can only expect more of the same. The work roles, skills, and environments that are needed and how they are valued will rapidly shift as business practices evolve. Indeed, 77% of industry experts expect a greater degree of change in the world of work in the next 10 years, while 43% of CFA Institute members and exam candidates said they believe the role they perform today will be substantially different in five to 10 years.
Success in this dynamic environment requires a learning and growth mindset. What does that entail? According to psychologist Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, those with growth mindsets “have a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment” because they possess “the belief that they can learn more or become smarter if they work hard and persevere — may learn more, learn it more quickly, and view challenges and failures as opportunities to improve their learning and skills.”
Technology is another essential aspect of career resilience. Since technological innovation is a key driver of the increasing depth and pace of change, we need to prioritize developing our tech savvy. It isn’t enough just to learn and apply new technologies. We also have to understand how to leverage them to find new business solutions and better ways to achieve client goals.
This aptitude is becoming more important as business models increasingly combine people and technology. Investment Professional of the Future describes these emerging models as Artificial (AI) Intelligence plus Human Intelligence (HI), or AI + HI.
In AI + HI settings, human judgment interprets the output of machines, communicates that output to colleagues and clients, and incorporates it into decisions. Such models require close cooperation between investment and technology professionals as they work together to enhance firm performance.
Source - Read More at: blogs.cfainstitute.org
