Tag: war for talent

How an Auditor Shortage Could Hurt Local Governments

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.route-fifty.com/finance/2023/04/how-auditor-shortage-could-hurt-local-governments/385337/

Excerpt:

It’s no surprise to anyone at this point that local governments are struggling to find workers. But finance departments are especially hard-hit when it comes to brain drain. A National Association of State Treasurers study found that 60% of public finance workers are over 45 while less than 20% are younger than 35.

The private sector is facing similar issues. According to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the accounting profession has an acute shortage of workers as the population of graduates with accounting degrees has declined over the years. 

….

ACFRs, unlike quarterly or other interim reports, are the official account of a government’s finances for the previous year and show how those numbers compare with previous years. It takes some time for finance departments to gather the year-end data, but getting those numbers audited is the last and generally the most time-consuming step before publishing the annual financial report. In some cases, like in Indiana and Ohio, the audit is conducted or signed off by the state auditor’s office. In other instances, localities hire a firm to audit their financial statements.

According to new data published by the University of Illinois Chicago and Merritt Research Services, the last decade has seen a 13% increase in the median amount of time for local government audits to be completed. That means most governments are posting their ACFRs at least three weeks later in the year compared with a decade ago. Nearly half of the increase has occurred over the last two years. The research focuses on the median—rather than the average—because some governments are extreme outliers and take a year and a half or even more than two years to file their annual report. 

Author(s): Liz Farmer

Publication Date: 18 Apr 2023

Publication Site: Route Fifty

Employment of “People with a Disability” Spiked to Record in Hot Labor Market. Applications for Disability Benefits Fell to 20-Year Low

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://wolfstreet.com/2023/02/03/employment-of-people-with-a-disability-spiked-to-record-in-hot-labor-market-applications-for-disability-benefits-fell-to-20-year-low/

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Excerpt:

The number of people with a disability who were employed in January spiked by 27% from January 2020, to 7.29 million in January — with December at 7.37 million having been the highest in the data from the BLS going back to 2008:

Author(s): Wolf Richter

Publication Date: 3 Feb 2023

Publication Site: Wolf Street

Forward Thinking on talent, state capacity, and being hopeful with Tyler Cowen

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/forward-thinking-on-talent-state-capacity-and-being-hopeful-with-tyler-cowen

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Excerpt:

Michael Chui: Fascinating. You mentioned talent. You recently coauthored a book with Daniel Gross entitled Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. What was the central thesis of this book?

Tyler Cowen: That talent is remarkably important. That we’re doing a poor job, misallocating talent. And there are a variety of ways, outlined in the book, we can do better. This book tries to be “the” talent book: a one-stop shopping guide to how to think about identifying talent.

Michael Chui: What are the macro implications of [the] lack of good matching? Is this a potential for accelerating productivity, for instance?

Tyler Cowen: We have slower economic growth when we don’t match talent well. We have a lower level of per capita income. When a recession comes, as was the case in 2008, labor markets adjust much more slowly. The consequences for human welfare are considerable.

Author(s): Michael Chui, Tyler Cowen

Publication Date: 28 Sept 2022

Publication Site: McKinsey

Retirement plans’ impact on recruiting and retention in the public market

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://reason.org/commentary/retirement-plans-impact-on-recruiting-and-retention-in-the-public-market/

Excerpt:

A number of conclusions regarding the retirement plan’s impact on recruiting and retention can be drawn from the MissionSquare survey results:  

Recruiting and retention should not be looked at as a singular issue. While public employers have seen steady success in hiring, retention has suffered greatly in recent years in the public market. 

The survey does not make the case that an employer’s retirement plan, whatever the design, has a substantial impact on recruiting or retention at all. In fact, the survey shows employers are more focused on employee morale, development, and engagement to enhance retention, along with salary increases. The survey does not suggest that there is a widespread recruiting issue although some positions, including nurses, engineers, and police officers, are more difficult to hire than others. 

Plan sponsors should avoid treating retirement plan design only as a tool for retaining employees. Rather, they should focus on a retirement plan design that realistically meets the needs of a modern workforce. The retirement plan should focus on providing lifetime income in retirement commensurate with the part of a career that an employee spends with a particular employer. The plan should recognize the realities of mobile modern employees and should not penalize employees that do not spend a full career with one employer. 

The survey illustrates that employers are focused on employee wellness as a means to improve retention. It follows that keeping employees happy should also be the focus of the retirement plan. Retention is best addressed by having a retirement plan that addresses the realities of the workforce today, as noted above.  

Author(s): Richard Hiller

Publication Date: 9 Aug 2022

Publication Site: Reason

Job Switchers Are Earning a Lot More Than Those Who Stay

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/inflation-switch-jobs-more-money-fed-atlanta-data-11658699425

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Excerpt:

The pay difference between those who stay and those who changed jobs is growing, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Job stayers, or people who stayed in their job for the past three months, increased their wages by about 4.7% as of June 2022. Meanwhile, those who switched jobs received a raise of 6.4%. The gap is the largest in two decades.

Workers are facing fast-rising prices on gas, groceries, rent and other essentials. Even in a tight labor market, many workers aren’t getting a large enough pay increase at their current job to keep up with inflation, say workers and economists who study the labor market. As a result, some Americans are reconsidering expenses they once considered affordable, while many also are looking for a new job with a bigger paycheck to keep up.

Prof. Yongseok Shin, an economics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, says inflation and the ability to get higher wages by changing companies are pushing many to move on. Some 47 million Americans have changed jobs in the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “I think the workers are paying a lot more attention,” said Prof. Shin. “They are comparing their wage growth with the headline inflation numbers.”

Author(s): Julia Carpenter

Publication Date: 25 Jul 2022

Publication Site: WSJ

Insurance Industry Outlook

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.selbyjennings.com/blog/2022/02/insurance-industry-outlook

Excerpt:

In health insurance, with the continual spike in Medicare, we forecast a huge shift towards this area and Medicaid in 2022, and beyond. With the way that the market has evolved, it’s possible that actuaries with experience in Medicare will be in-demand, especially as bid season is fast approaching. Alongside proficiency in risk adjustment, the Society of Actuaries (SOA) recently added a new exam for predictive analytics.

As always, for the property & casualty sector, the key modelling skillsets going into 2022 is R and Python. With the rise in cyber and ransomware attacks, this might result in a boom in cyber insurance and simultaneously the specialists, minimum of 2-3 years in underwriting, to better service this demand. In addition to fluency in modelling, designations from Associates of the Casualty Actuary Society (ACAS) and Fellowship of the Casualty Actuary Society (FCAS), has importance to employers and therefore significant currency in the market.

Publication Date: July 2022

Publication Site: Selby Jennings

The Great Attrition is making hiring harder. Are you searching the right talent pools?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-great-attrition-is-making-hiring-harder-are-you-searching-the-right-talent-pools

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Excerpt:

Despite significant changes in the economy since the onset of the Great Attrition (or what many call the Great Resignation), the share of workers planning to leave their jobs remains unchanged from 2021, at 40 percent. That’s two out of five employees in our global sample who said that they are thinking about leaving in the next three to six months.

However, the past year has revealed nuances of the larger trend:

Reshuffling. Employees are quitting and going to different employers in different industries (48 percent of the job leavers in our sample). Some industries are disproportionately losing talent, others are struggling to attract talent, and some are grappling with both.

Reinventing. Many employees leaving traditional employment are either going to nontraditional work (temporary, gig, or part-time roles) or starting their own businesses. Of the employees who quit without a new job in hand, 47 percent chose to return to the workforce. However, only 29 percent returned to traditional full-time employment.

Reassessing. Many people are quitting not for other jobs but because of the demands of life—they need to care for children, elders, or themselves. These are people who may have stepped out of the workforce entirely, dramatically shrinking the readily available talent pool.

Author(s): Aaron De Smet, Bonnie Dowling, Bryan Hancock, and Bill Schaninger

Publication Date: 13 July 2022

Publication Site: McKinsey

ACTUARY VERSUS DATA SCIENCE

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2022/may/actuary-versus-data-science.html

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Excerpt:

The number of candidates sitting for entry level exam P and exam FM decreased over the last decade. Figure 1 below shows the total attempts for Exams P and FM halving over the past decade.

This represents an average decline of 7% per year across the two exams. This shows a major change from 2013 when the Actuarial Profession was consistently ranked #1 in national job lists and the number of candidates sitting for exams was growing year over year. For reference, Actuary is currently ranked #20, behind software developer (#5) and data scientist (#6).

One hypothesis is that data scientists and similar job openings are drawing potential actuaries away from the profession. To investigate this question, we queried fifteen colleges, actuarial clubs, and their recent graduates to see if this trend was noticeable, with key learnings summarized below:

Candidates at schools with Society of Actuaries (SOA)’s Centers of Actuarial Excellence (CAE) recognition are more than twice as likely to remain on the actuarial career path. Further, the strongest programs appear to attract other majors due to the top-tier program and resources

Recently established data science majors are pulling some students away from actuarial science and quite a few interviewees perceived that the popularity of the actuarial science program is declining

For international students, there is a general perception that it is harder to get an actuarial job that provides working visa sponsorship, while most data science jobs still provide sponsorship

The mixed results between the first two findings suggest that the strongest college actuarial programs are becoming stronger while schools with fledgling or small programs may be struggling. For example, actuarial career fairs tend to be successful only after achieving a level of scale so that they are well attended by both prospective hires and recruiters.

Author(s): Eve Sun, Mark Spong, Roger Yuan

Publication Date: May 2022

Publication Site: Oliver Wyman