Why skills gaps are only half the story
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report, 63% of employers identify skills gaps as the biggest barrier to business transformation. In Asset, Auto and Equipment Finance, this challenge is acute. But through our work placing senior talent across the industry, we’ve identified a second, equally critical issue that many organisations overlook.
For the first time in history, five generations are working side-by-side: Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. Each brings completely different expectations, learning habits, digital fluency, communication preferences, and assumptions about career progression. According to Deloitte’s 2024 research, 67% of HR leaders cite aligning multigenerational teams around shared culture as one of their top concerns.
The challenge for 2026 isn’t choosing between addressing skills gaps or managing workforce diversity. It’s recognising these challenges are deeply interconnected, and that traditional recruitment and development approaches won’t solve either.
The fragmented workforce in asset finance
Workforce diversity now extends far beyond demographics. By 2030, Millennials and Gen Z will comprise roughly 74% of the global workforce (Deloitte, 2025), yet asset finance organisations must simultaneously retain and transfer decades of industry-specific knowledge from experienced professionals who are delaying retirement.
The result is unprecedented variation in how people work within your organisation:
- Some employees learn through immersion and experimentation; others need structured guidance through complex credit decisions and portfolio management
- Veterans rely on judgement formed through decades of understanding credit risk, customer relationships and market cycles; digital natives rely on data analytics, AI-powered decisioning tools and automated workflows
- Different generations have fundamentally different preferences for hybrid work, communication channels, and feedback frequency
- Career motivations vary dramatically, from stability and progression to flexibility and purpose-driven work
When you design workforce strategies assuming these groups behave uniformly, friction becomes inevitable. Standardised career paths, uniform training programmes, and generic performance expectations simply don’t match the diversity of needs in today’s asset finance industry.
The skills actually in demand
Through our work across the sector, we’re seeing consistent demand for specific capabilities more so now than five years ago:
Technical and analytical skills:
- Data analytics and portfolio performance modelling
- AI and machine learning implementation for credit decisioning
- API integration and platform connectivity
- Cybersecurity and fraud prevention
- BI across ESG and Compliance
Industry domain knowledge remains critical:
- Understanding asset types, residual values and lifecycle management
- Credit risk assessment across different collateral classes
- Regulatory compliance (FCA, PRA, sectoral regulations)
- Vendor and dealer relationship management
- Lease structuring and complex finance arrangements
Leadership and transformation capabilities:
- Change management across digital transformation programmes
- Cross-generational team leadership
- Stakeholder management across diverse groups
- Strategic thinking combined with operational delivery
- Commercial acumen in evolving market conditions
The challenge isn’t just finding people with the aforementioned experience. It’s finding people who combine deep industry domain knowledge with capability. A business analyst who understands domain specific workflows is valuable. A business analyst who understands domain specific workflows, optimisation and has ten years of experience assessing, transformation and business benefit realisation is significantly more valuable.
Solving skills gaps through diversity
Different generations have markedly different job search behaviours, career motivations, and workplace expectations. A training programme that works for one segment often fails for others. Generic upskilling initiatives waste resources and leave critical gaps unfilled.
Effective workforce development in asset finance requires three fundamental shifts:
- Multiply career paths, don’t streamline them
People used to think everyone learned the same things in the same order. Your organisation needs specialist tracks (credit, underwriting, risk, portfolio management), delivery tracks (customer relationship management, problem-solving, deal structuring), technical tracks (data, automation, platforms, integration), and leadership tracks (culture, strategy, transformation). These allow people to grow without being forced into roles that don’t match their strengths or motivations.
- Make learning continuous and personalised
Scheduled multi-day training courses don’t work for a fragmented workforce managing live portfolios and customer relationships. Modern learning must shift toward:
- Micro-upskilling embedded in daily workflows
- Peer-to-peer knowledge transfer across generations (pairing experienced credit professionals with technically skilled younger colleagues)
- Scenario-based practice with real asset finance examples
- AI-driven training triggered by workflow needs
Learning must be woven into daily work, not treated as periodic events that take people off the desk for days at a time.
- Develop leaders who can translate across differences
Research shows resilience, flexibility, and emotional intelligence as critical leadership skills for 2025-2030. Leaders in asset finance must now translate between digital fluency levels, generational expectations, structured and autonomous work styles, and those who embrace versus resist change.
Authority alone won’t drive engagement in modern asset finance organisations. Clarity, empathy, and coherence across diverse experiences will. This means recruiting and developing leaders who can bridge traditional relationship-driven business models with data-driven decision-making cultures.
Technology amplifies existing strengths and weaknesses
Many organisations assume new systems or AI tools will naturally modernise their workforce and close skills gaps. According to Adecco’s 2025 Global Workforce report, while workers save an average of an hour or more per day using AI tools, only a fraction have ever received formal AI training from their employers.
In Asset Finance, we see this play out repeatedly. Technology magnifies what already exists. Poor communication becomes amplified misalignment across credit committees and portfolio reviews. Inconsistent learning can expose deeper capability gaps especially when implementing a new platform. Unclear leadership creates confusion across digital workflows. Fragmented culture reveals tension through data transparency.
Technology is an accelerant, not a strategy. It requires the human infrastructure to make it effective. This is why hiring experienced decision-makers who understand both the industry and the technology becomes essential.
What talent expects from Asset, Auto and Equipment Finance employers in 2026
Research from Catalyst, CIPD, and Deloitte converges on four elements that have become non-negotiable for attracting and retaining talent in financial services:
Purpose. Employees want to understand the impact of their work. In asset finance, this means connecting their daily credit decisions, customer relationships, and portfolio management to business growth and customer outcomes.
Flexibility. Not just hybrid location policies, but genuine flexibility in how outcomes are achieved. According to CIPD research, employers recognise that the concept of a workday has fundamentally shifted. Asset Finance, traditionally relationship-driven and office-based, must adapt without losing the collaborative culture that makes deals work.
Development. Clear growth tracks and ongoing learning matter more than single promotions. With Gen Z averaging just 1.1 years of job tenure compared to Gen X’s 2.8 years, continuous development has become essential for retention. In our recruitment work, we repeatedly see talented professionals leave organisations not because of salary, but because they can’t see their next career step.
Inclusion and wellbeing. Supporting employee health and wellbeing has emerged as the top priority for talent attraction, with 64% of employers identifying it as a key strategy. Additionally, organisations with robust diversity and inclusion practices are 2.7 times more likely to compete successfully for new business opportunities.
These elements must become part of organisational design in asset finance, not optional employee benefits.
The path forward for Asset, Auto and Equipment Finance organisations
CIPD research found that two-thirds of organisations struggle to fill positions, and 28% of roles now require entirely new skills. Simultaneously, you must lead increasingly diverse teams who think, learn, and progress differently.
Through our work across the sector, we see that the Asset, Auto and Equipment Finance organisations that will thrive won’t be those that force uniformity. They’ll be the ones that build flexible approaches that embrace a candidate’s diversity of experience, motivation, and capability, while simultaneously addressing critical skills gaps through personalised, continuous development.
The workforce of the future will be heterogeneous. The organisations that succeed will be designed for it. And critically, they’ll recognise that deep industry domain knowledge doesn’t disappear in importance just because technical skills matter more than they used to. You need both.
