Addressing Skills Gaps in Finance Teams: The Most Common Issues (and How to Fix Them)
We surveyed hundreds of finance professionals and finance leaders to understand how organizations are managing skills development across their teams. What we found was striking: 67% of finance organizations report struggling with a skills gap, and 65% of finance professionals are personally concerned about gaps in their own capabilities.
Those numbers tell an important story. Skills gaps in finance are not the exception — they’re the norm. And in most organizations, they’ve persisted for years without being systematically addressed.
Addressing skills gaps in finance teams is not just about training; it’s about identifying the subtle capability shortfalls that often surface at critical moments — the senior analyst who can’t defend a model assumption in front of a CFO, the planning cycle that runs three weeks late because forecasts keep coming back for rework, or the new hire who takes six months to reach the productivity level expected in six weeks. The work gets done, but with more effort, more senior time, and less confidence than the business deserves.
This article explores the capability gaps we see most consistently across finance teams, the organizational dynamics that allow them to persist, and what it actually takes to close them.
Why Finance Skills Gaps Are So Hard to See
In most business functions, a skills gap is reasonably visible. Someone cannot do the task, and it shows up quickly in the output. Finance is different in a way that makes gaps especially easy to miss until they have been affecting performance for a long time.
The distance between adequate and genuinely capable in finance is almost always invisible from above and only partially visible from within the team itself. An analyst can produce a financial model that clears every review checkpoint while building it on a methodology they cannot fully explain or adapt when the inputs change. A team can close every monthly reporting cycle accurately, yet never develop the forward-looking skills that would make them valuable in a strategic planning conversation.
In practice, this means finance team skills gaps often remain hidden behind seemingly solid outputs.
- Reports are delivered on time, but lack insight.
- Models “work,” but can’t be adapted under pressure.
- Teams look stable, but future-facing capability is thin.
Output-only evaluation hides underperformance
Performance in finance is typically evaluated at the output level. Did the work get delivered? Was it accurate? Was it on time? Those questions do not capture whether the underlying capability that produced the output is strong enough to handle greater complexity, scale with the organization, or develop the team members doing the work.
This is where finance team underperformance often begins: the outputs look acceptable, but the finance skills for teams are not keeping pace with what the business needs.
Culture makes gaps hard to admit
There is a cultural dimension to this as well. Finance is a field where credibility depends on confidence and precision. Professionals who are uncertain about something typically work around it rather than surfacing it. They check with a peer, they take longer, they avoid assignments where the gap might show.
The result is that managers often have no clear view of where the team is operating at the edge of its capability until something goes wrong, and by that point, the gap has usually been there for years.
The Skills Gaps We See Most Often in Finance Teams
Across the finance organizations we work with, certain capability gaps appear consistently enough that they warrant examination. These are the gaps most likely affecting your team right now and shaping your finance team development priorities.
Inconsistent financial modeling methodology
This is the most common gap we encounter, and it often goes unaddressed precisely because the team can model. The problem is that they all model differently.
When financial modeling is learned informally, by reverse-engineering existing files and absorbing techniques from colleagues over time, the result is a team where everyone has their own approach, their own structural logic, and their own conventions. Models cannot be handed off cleanly. Errors are difficult to catch because there is no shared standard to check against.
The cost is measurable: senior team members spend significant time reviewing and often rebuilding analyses that should arrive ready to use. Standardizing modeling methodology across a team is one of the highest-return investments a finance organization can make, and one of the most straightforward problems that structured finance training solves.
Short-term, inconsistent modeling looks like individual style. Long-term, it becomes one of the most expensive finance team skills gaps in the organization.
Financial storytelling and communication
Finance teams are increasingly expected to do more than produce accurate numbers. They are expected to synthesize analysis into a clear point of view, communicate it to non-finance stakeholders, and make it actionable for decision-makers who do not have time to interrogate the methodology. Most finance training programs, formal or informal, do not develop this skill at all.
The gap shows up in:
- Presentations that lead with inputs instead of conclusions
- Reports that show what happened without explaining what to do
- Analysts who are technically strong but struggle to hold the room
As finance functions expand their strategic influence, communication has become a performance-critical skill. Teams that develop it gain significantly more organizational influence than those that do not.
FP&A and forward-looking analysis
Many finance professionals receive thorough training in historical accounting and financial reporting. The forward-looking skills at the core of FP&A work, including driver-based forecasting, scenario and sensitivity analysis, and business planning methodology, tend to develop later and less systematically.
The gap matters most when the business asks finance to go beyond the numbers: to model the financial implications of a strategic decision, to build a forecast that leadership can use for resource allocation, or to identify which business drivers are most likely to move performance.
These are high-value capabilities that cannot be developed through exposure alone. They require deliberate instruction from people who have built forecasting models in real planning environments and understand how finance skills for teams must evolve as the business grows.
Excel and data tool fluency
Excel proficiency across most finance teams follows a predictable pattern. A small group of people is highly skilled. The majority are functional. A meaningful minority are working around limitations in ways that slow them down and introduce errors without anyone fully registering it as a training problem.
- Power users carry a disproportionate workload
- “Functional” users are slower than they need to be
- Less fluent users increase risk and rework
The gap between functional and fluent in Excel is measurable in hours per week. And as finance tools evolve to include financial planning platforms, Power BI, and increasingly AI-assisted workflows, the gap is widening.
Teams that are not actively developing technical tooling skills are falling behind, a trend that will become more visible as the bar for what finance is expected to deliver continues to rise.
Accounting fundamentals in non-traditional hires
Finance teams today include professionals from a wider range of backgrounds than they did a generation ago: economists, MBAs, analysts from consulting and banking who joined after building financial modeling skills without a deep grounding in accounting. Many of these individuals are highly capable in analysis and modeling, while carrying gaps in the foundational knowledge that underpins that work.
Accounting fundamentals are load-bearing. A team member who does not fully understand how revenue recognition affects reported earnings, how accruals move through the statements, or how the three financial statements are connected will make modeling errors that are difficult to catch and harder to explain to leadership.
We see this gap most often in teams that grew quickly and hired for analytical ability without verifying foundational depth. Over time, those hiring patterns turn into systemic finance team underperformance on complex, judgment-heavy work.
Leadership and people development skills at the senior level
Senior finance professionals are promoted for technical excellence and then expected to manage, develop, and retain the people below them, often without meaningful development in how to do so well. This is one of the most consequential gaps in a finance organization, because the quality of management at the senior level shapes the development trajectory of every team member below.
Teams with managers who were not developed as leaders tend to have higher turnover, weaker bench strength, and a culture where development happens for the most self-directed individuals and stalls for everyone else. The gap at the top does not remain there.
From a finance team development perspective, this is often the leverage point: fixing leadership capability unlocks progress on every other capability gap in the team.
Why These Gaps Survive in Organizations That Care
Development left to individuals
The persistence of skills gaps in finance is not usually a reflection of indifference. Most finance leaders are genuinely invested in their team’s development. The gaps survive anyway, and the reasons are organizational rather than motivational.
The most common pattern we see is development treated as the individual’s responsibility. The organization provides access to resources, sometimes a learning budget, and expects motivated professionals to take ownership of their growth.
This model:
- Works for already self-directed high performers
- Does little for hidden or uncomfortable gaps
- Does not address team-level inconsistency
It does not close the hardest-to-see gaps in oneself, nor does it address the structural inconsistency that affects the team as a whole.
No shared capability standard
A second factor is the absence of a capability standard. Without a defined picture of what a finance professional at each level and in each role should be able to demonstrate, gap assessment is impressionistic.
Managers can identify who seems strong and who seems to struggle, but cannot say precisely what the gap is or measure whether development is closing it. Most organizations have job descriptions. They do not have capability benchmarks. That absence makes systematic improvement nearly impossible and allows finance team skills gaps to persist across years and leadership changes.
Poor timing between training and practice
Timing is a third issue that does not get enough attention. Even excellent training fails when it is disconnected from practice. Finance professionals who complete a course and then step back into their regular workflow, with no near-term opportunity to use what they just learned, lose the majority of it within weeks.
Most organizations assign training without thinking carefully about when the skill will actually be used. That single design flaw accounts for a significant share of the training investment that does not produce lasting change.
Limited infrastructure for acting on observations
Finally, most managers lack the infrastructure to act on what they observe. They can identify that a team member needs to improve their financial modeling or their analytical communication. They cannot assign a structured learning path, track progress against it, or use objective data to demonstrate to leadership that the investment is producing results.
Without that infrastructure, development remains ad hoc regardless of how much intention there is. This is one of the core reasons finance team development efforts stall after initial enthusiasm.
What Closing Gaps in Finance Teams Actually Requires
Addressing skills gaps in finance teams is achievable. But it requires more than finding good content and pointing people toward it. The organizations that do it well share a consistent set of practices.
Get specific before you go looking for solutions
The starting point is always a specific picture of the gaps, not a general sense of them. Which capabilities are actually missing, how severely, and in whom? What is the real business impact?
General development plans produce general improvement. Specific gap assessments produce targeted interventions that change the metrics that matter.
A practical assessment process often includes:
- An honest review of recent outputs
- Direct conversations about where people feel least confident
- Comparison of current skills to a clear capability standard
Done with genuine curiosity rather than judgment, this process takes less than a week and produces more useful information than most formal assessments.
The instruction needs to come from people who have done the work
This distinction matters more than most people realize when they are evaluating training options. Generic professional development content covers finance concepts. Content built specifically for finance by people who have done the work covers how those concepts operate in the actual conditions of financial analysis: the constraints, the judgment calls, the shortcuts, and watch-outs that only come from experience.
Every course in CFI’s curriculum is built and taught by practitioners with direct finance industry experience. Our instructors have held the roles your team occupies. They have built live models, run real planning cycles, and presented analysis to people who were skeptical and pressed for time. That experience is what makes the instruction useful in ways that academic content cannot replicate.
For employers dealing with chronic finance team underperformance, practitioner-led instruction is often the fastest way to reset standards and expectations.
Someone has to own the team’s capability, not just its output
The single most impactful organizational change in addressing finance team skills gaps is reorienting the manager’s role. Managers who track individual capability, assign specific development tied to role requirements, connect training to real work opportunities, and make development a genuine part of performance conversations produce teams that improve continuously.
Managers who leave development to individual motivation produce teams where the strongest get stronger, while the gaps in everyone else go unnoticed. The difference is not talent or resources. It is ownership.
CFI for Teams provides managers with the infrastructure to take that ownership seriously: role-based learning path assignments, team-level progress tracking, and certification programs that translate development activity into verifiable capability data. The tools are there. What matters is whether the manager treats team capability as something they are accountable for building.
The Finance Teams That Close the Gap Keep Widening It in Their Favor
Skills gaps in finance teams are not a sign of a weak team. They are a sign of a team that was never given a deliberate framework for developing. Most finance professionals were trained informally, learned what the immediate job required, and built judgment through exposure rather than instruction.
That process produces capable people. It also produces teams with accumulated gaps that compound quietly until they become the ceiling on what the function can achieve.
Closing those gaps changes the trajectory. A finance team that models consistently, communicates analysis clearly, and develops forward-looking capability systematically is a function that can do significantly more for the business than a team of the same size still operating at the ceiling of informal development.
In other words, strong finance skills for teams do more than fix today’s problems—they reset what the finance function can contribute over the next several years.
The starting point is always the same: a specific picture of where your team’s capability actually stands, mapped against a clear standard for what the work requires. Not a general sense that development would help, but a precise enough view that you can prioritize the gaps that are costing you most.
That level of clarity is less common than it should be in finance organizations. It is also where every meaningful improvement we have seen begins, and where effective finance team development truly starts.
CFI for Teams gives finance managers a structured way to assess capability gaps, assign role-based training paths, and track development at the team level.
