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In demand Legal, Risk & Compliance skills

In demand Legal, Risk and Compliance skills
Submitted by Harry Double on

Many organisations are facing a skills shortage. Add to this the fact that recruitment markets have tightened up significantly after last year’s widespread hiring sprees, and it has never been more important to ensure you are identifying the best possible skills that will help drive your teams forward.

Equally, from a professional’s perspective, upskilling and improving your knowledge of key areas within your area of expertise is a great way to improve your career prospects.

As part of our new salary guide, we identified some of the most important Compliance, Legal and Risk Management skills that employers globally look for when hiring into their teams. Here’s what we found…

Key Legal skills:

Legal Counsel

A legal counsel acts as a general lawyer for a company, handling all legal related matters. To fulfil this role, the individual must have broad understanding and experience in numerous areas of law.

Intellectual Property

For any business, properly protecting its brand, products and services is important in often saturated industries. Lawyers specialising in intellectual property are able to protect and enforce rights relating to products or services and their distribution.

Litigation

In certain situations, it may be necessary for a company to take a dispute to a court of law. Litigation lawyers are the ones who handle this process, issuing court proceedings and dealing with disclosure.

Employment Law

Broadly, employment law encompasses and regulates a relationship between an employer and its workforce, offering protection to both parties. From job contracts, to bullying and harassment, organisations need to have a clear stance on these matters and require legal expertise to do so.

Corporate Finance Law

When a business is going through growth, it will need to finance its operations. Corporate finance law ensures that the company’s structure is compliant in terms of laws and regulations of the region in which it operates.

Skills for Risk Management:

Risk Reporting

Understanding the various risks a company faces is important when undertaking any project or business activity. Risk reporting helps to identify any risks involved that may impact business processes, and subsequent actions can be taken to mitigate them.

Credit & Market Risk

Experience across both credit and market risk is desirable as it allows an organisation to have a better understanding of the possibility of losses due to a default on a debt (credit risk) and the possibility of losses due to movements in uncontrollable market variables (market risk).

Operational Risk

Having processes in place that monitor the day-to-day risks of occurrences that could result in disruption of business operations, and subsequently direct or indirect financial loss, is known as operational risk. Factors such as employee error, fraudulent activity and actual events can all have an impact.

Risk Analytics

Through techniques and technologies that allow insight extrapolation, likely scenarios can be identified and future events can be predicted - this is risk analytics. With a greater awareness of risk these days, this largely accurate approach is a key aspect of an organisation’s risk management activity today.

Embedding Risk Frameworks

Overarching all angles of risk management, the ability to effectively embed risk frameworks into an organisation is crucial. An individual working in this area will set up, enhance and review a risk management framework.

Key Compliance skills:

Compliance Monitoring

The purpose of compliance monitoring is to identify compliance risks within an organisation’s operations. It’s important as it allows them to check how well business operations meet regulatory and internal process obligations.

Compliance Advisory

Compliance advisory helps companies evaluate how effective their compliance functions are by looking deeply into procedures and policies. This is an integral part of ensuring the business is compliant and abiding to all relevant regulations.

Financial Crime Compliance

Organisations actively take steps to reduce the risk of being a victim of financial crime. Financial crime compliance allows a business to detect and evaluate any suspicious activity, and then take action to prevent it.

Data Privacy

Experience in data privacy has gathered serious momentum in recent years. With stricter data privacy laws in place, any violation can lead to reputational damage and significant fines - organisations need professionals with the skills to prevent that from happening.

Embedding Compliance Frameworks

Embedding compliance frameworks ensures an organisation is adhering to all necessary regulations and laws relating to the region in which it operates. It underpins all areas of compliance.

Interpersonal, soft skills

As well as the more technical Legal, Compliance and Risk Management skills and abilities outlined above, there are a few key interpersonal, soft skills to look out for.

  • Stakeholder engagement
  • Multi-task and ability to prioritise
  • Communication skills
  • System enhancement/IT skills

If you are looking to hire someone in Legal, Risk or Compliance, get in touch today.

Equally, if you are a professional in these areas and are looking for your next career move, we have a range of jobs available - you can browse them here.