Shortage in Compliance Profession

During this sluggish financial market environment, does the excess demand for compliance practitioners remain? Recently HKSI released a research report titled "Grooming of Talent in the Financial Industry", which is an industry research conducted on the manpower gap in the financial sector. I've got the following insights relevant to the compliance profession from this report:

• Competition for talent is keen in the financial industry, though the shortage has been relieved after the sub-prime crisis. So this year the turnover rate of compliance officers has been lower.
• There is an acute shortage in compliance because this area requires specialized knowledge that can't be easily nurtured through universities. Many firms, particularly smaller companies, prefer not to hire inexperienced people. They are willing to train existing staff but less willing to train new hands from scratch. It follows that fresh graduates or laymen may encounter barriers to entry for the compliance profession.
• Two rapid areas of growth are private banking and wealth management. These areas require people with good interpersonal skills and other soft skills as much as hard skills. This happens to be the area in which Hong Kong's new university graduates appear to be the weakest. Soft skills are not only important for relationship managers but also for compliance officers.
• There is a big gap between self-rated ability and employer-rated ability. While employers are generally satisfied with employees' technical skills, they are not so satisfied with their general lack of creativity, problem solving skills, management skills, and languages skills. Compliance officers spending time only on technical knowledge may lose competiveness in the future.
• Many employees have a strong desire to pursue a career in the financial industry and have the motivation to learn. But they will need to be more proactive, instead of being reactive. They should also develop a global perspective and have a good sense about the financial markets. Some compliance officers, especially those trained up by a regulatory body, have remain bureaucratic and narrow-minded in facing with the rapid changes of the world.