Good morning. Most CFOs aren’t giving up on junior talent. They’re giving up on the old way of developing it.
That’s the subject of a conversation I had with James Tucker, who leads corporate finance and strategy globally at Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Tucker talks to hundreds of finance chiefs a year. His read: entry-level hiring hasn’t totally stopped, but the job itself is being rewritten in real time.
“The old reliable model was, ‘I’ll hire people who’ve studied and got their accounting certificates, and what they’re really good at is doing a replicable task at a high level of accuracy and quality,” Tucker said. Firms hired large cohorts to do routine finance work, like reconciliations, journal entries, and basic reporting. They then watched who rose to the top.
AI is changing that.
What replaces the old model, in Tucker’s framing, is a pillar: fewer people, hired for judgment rather than task execution, operating as quality control on top of AI-built systems rather than producing the numbers themselves.
That’s the tension. The work AI is taking over is also how junior employees traditionally developed judgment. AI can do the research, drafting and problem decomposition; junior employees get fewer chances to practice those skills.
The concern is showing up in the data. A recent working paper by Harvard researchers suggests generative AI adoption can reduce hiring of junior workers, particularly in AI-exposed jobs, while having much less effect on existing senior workers.
In a BCG global study of C-suite leaders, half said they’re already seeing “de-skilling” in their organizations, and more than 60% expect it to become a material problem within three to five years. More than half cited slower junior-talent development as an underlying driver.
So what should CFOs do?
Tucker’s answer is to replace volume with concentration—and automation with apprenticeship. Rather than spreading the remaining manual, judgment-based work, such as the roughly 10% of reconciliations that resist automation, across a large junior class, firms should concentrate those reps on fewer people so an experience curve still forms.
Junior staff also need to be in the room for real decisions, not processing “widgets” in the back office, so they absorb judgment through observation and repetition. Rotations between finance and the business can help, too. Tucker sees a consistent gap in junior talent: strong technical acumen, weak business acumen. Getting people closer to pricing, operations, and strategy gives them context that spreadsheets alone can’t provide.
Hiring criteria are shifting accordingly. Accounting skills are still desired, but there’s more focus on pattern recognition and the instinct to know when an output looks wrong.
Sheryl Estrada [email protected]
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