For decades, the appeal of working abroad and career advancement goals have lured some of Canada’s top homegrown financial services talent to global financial centres such as New York, London and Hong Kong. At the same time, Toronto has been attracting talent from around the world who want to contribute to, and benefit from its vibrant, growing financial services and fintech ecosystem, and experience the high quality of life that it offers.
Increasingly, HR leaders are being tasked with building their organization’s future workforce – one with the skills needed to effectively leverage rapid advancements in technology, to propel their business forward in today’s progressively competitive environment.
Topics: Canada, Talent, Toronto, Upskilling
TFI launched The ASPIRE Challenge in October 2018; a competitive, industry-led innovation challenge designed to attract 2nd year post-secondary students to Financial Services and showcase innovation within the sector. The Challenge was built to incorporate meaningful employer interaction and feedback into every stage, providing all participants with solid work-integrated learning (WIL) experience and increasing the number of WIL opportunities available to students within the GTA.
Rotman School of Management, in partnership with TD Bank, are working to develop a Financial Acumen Development Program for Women. This program will complement Rotman’s many programs within its Initiative for Women in Business, which has been committed to strengthening the female talent pipeline since 2008. The purpose of this Financial Acumen Development Program is to help women working in Canada’s Financial industry improve their Analytical Thinking and Financial Acumen Skills.
Work-integrated learning (WIL) – an unfamiliar phrase to most of us, is a term meant to modernize and broaden the definition of student work experience beyond traditional examples such as co-ops and internships. Given its potential to positively impact the level of work readiness and employability among our student population across Canada, it’s no wonder that the concept of WIL is growing in popularity among post-secondary educators, employer talent acquisition teams and government officials alike. In fact, governments at all levels are proactively investing in WIL, to support students’ transition to the workplace. One example of this progressive support is the federal government’s $2M+ investment earlier this year in expanding ASPIRE, a sector-wide, student WIL initiative led by Toronto Finance International. ASPIRE’s goal is the creation of 10,000 new WIL opportunities in financial services by the end of 2020.
The Canadian government recently released its immigration levels plan for 2019 to 2021, aimed at increasing permanent residents to Canada, with a focus on spurring economic innovation.
Toronto employs almost 400,000 professionals in the Financial Services Industry; making it Canada’s largest financial centre, and the second largest financial center in North America. Financial Services (FS) professionals work in the country’s well-established banking institutions, as well as in securities and investment, insurance, fund management and technology companies. While the FS industry has been actively developing this talent domestically, having world-class talent means attracting many professionals from abroad. The FS industry in Toronto has had to innovate to attract, develop and retain top talent to sustain its competitive advantage, among other global financial hubs.
Topics: Canada, Talent, Finance, International Markets
In TFI’s recent talent report Unlocking the Human Opportunity: Future-Proof Skills to Move Financial Services Forward, we propose that the key to harnessing the most out of technology is to focus on people. To that end, we introduced four core skills groups to help our members future-proof their workforces, regardless of how, and at what pace technology continues to evolve.
Similar core themes run through our latest talent report released this summer in partnership with Deloitte The changing faces of cybersecurity: Closing the cyber risk gap, which offers an innovative yet practical approach to addressing the growing global talent shortage in this business-critical function, with a focus on the Canadian landscape.
Topics: Canada, Cybersecurity, Talent
