Keeping up with the market
As financial institutions moved toward more individualized and tailored benefits, it is not only up to the bank or insurance company to train its staff, but employee ownership is also expected to ensure personal development. Many local employees have remained passive in this aspect and insufficiently ensured that they remained “in tune” to signal new trends in banking that would set them apart from others in the company. A human-robot culture of coming to work, doing your job, and getting paid is very prevalent in the labor psyche. Employees generally insufficiently seek-out new courses or trainings in order to keep growing their skill sets.
Many Curacao 40-60 year-olds in the financial market come from an era where “seniority” and years worked in one single company would automatically result in continuous promotion. As we entered the new millennium, this model started changing rapidly toward skills based evaluations and assessments of employees. Even today some local companies, including the government, are still in the process of deploying a performance based culture where employees take more charge of their own skills-package. An individual annual assessment may be in place, but if employees do not follow-up through annual performance plans and actually delivering annual personal development goals, the company or government will keep recording growing issues on multiple dimensions. The recent focus and benchmarking of Curacao’s Tax Institutions, and its gap analysis, is a very concrete example of a performance and delivery-driven culture that “stayed behind” or may be even non-existent.
You talk, you walk
In Dutch there is an expression that translates roughly to “if you write, you stay in our sight, if you talk, out you walk”. It touches upon the essence of a large problem faced with today’s Curacao workforce. There is an inability to develop a structured taught-process on any issue, and convert it onto paper. Not to mention the ability to write well in any of the three official Dutch Kingdom languages in the Caribbean. Business writing has become a very real and present skills gap amongst employees in the finance sector. In order to convey new ideas, signal new finance trends, or set-out a problem and provide a solution, it is important to be able to write well, and present the issue at hand in a structured way. This doesn’t mean that every presentation has to be via a Word-document, or email text, a Power Point or short-film presentation is also an acceptable instrument. Employees that are able to deliver their concepts to management of the Board of Directors at institutions, tend to stay during periods of lay-offs.
The tech-gap
Most developments in the financial sector are driven by technology. Whether it is the move from the branch to online banking, and onto mobile banking, or ever faster payments and transactions such as through InstaPay, or parallel payments solutions like local e-wallets or international ones from Apple, Google or PayPal for example, digital investments, or even cryptocurrencies. The use of artificial intelligence and big data to generate all sorts of process efficiencies require employees that can be part of these transformational projects.
If you haven’t been reading-up, gaining some knowledge by watching online presentations, or following (online) courses, your added value to a financial institution starts to shrink rapidly, no matter how many in-house years you have.
In Curacao the stigma that “IT is boring or only for nerds”
has a big impact on the creation and subsequent availability of local talent.
It starts with education
Poverty is an inhibitor for technological development of the next generation. However, schools take-up 5 hours each weekday from any child’s time. And that is already significant. A much broader exposure to technology within the curriculum from the age of 6 years through increased use of technology in classes, intuitive objects-based programming (not old-fashioned hard coding), basic robotics via Lego-style gameplay, are all formative steps that the Ministry of Education must deploy in schools.
Obviously there are barriers to overcome such as stable broadband internet in all schools, but this cannot be an excuse for not developing a more tech-based approach in
the meantime.
More teacher-directed “free time” in school where children or adolescent students think about and debate current market- or social events provides the necessary creative mind processes to exercise structured thoughts and bring about a solutions-driven mentality. Going back to the basics of thinking, expressing and writing, but in a more digitized shape will bring-forth the local talent that many financial companies today are forced to hire from abroad.