"The fact there's so much that's out there and available opens up a whole new world of possibilities and risks," he added. "This is the new math; it's a new way of functioning and thinking about the world."

Paul McDonald, senior executive director at Robert Half, said that as companies try to make use of the "mounds of data" now available to them, they're looking to accounting and finance employees to do that work.

In part, companies are taking advantage of the fact that they've automated some of the transactional work that used to keep finance and accounting employees busy, McDonald said.

He cited as an example the 10, 15, 20 days, or even more, that accountants used to spend closing the company's books. "If the books close in three days, there's potentially 18 or 19 other business days where these individuals are working on project teams to analyze data," said McDonald, pictured at left. "So, much earlier in one's career in the finance department, they're being asked to do the analytics, do the data mining, and then help interpret what are the trends."

The Robert Half survey suggests some dissatisfaction with employees' skills in this area: Just 40% of the CFOs rated their finance and accounting workers' business analytics skills as excellent, while 52% said they are good, and 8% rated them as fair to poor.

But companies are stepping up to the plate with training. According to the survey, 82% of the CFOs said they provide in-house training on business analytics, while 41% cited mentoring and 40% outside industry courses and events. Another 40% are working with a consultant, and 35% offer tuition reimbursement. Universities and colleges are rolling out business analytics programs for finance students, Dhar said."Everyone's scrambling to offer these programs, and they're all of a different flavor, as you might imagine, depending on the university and the kind of orientation they have."

In general, the business analytics programs aim for both breadth and depth of skills, Dhar said, by including both traditional skills such as mathematics and statistics, and newer skills such as "machine learning and high-performance databases," and by making sure that students have the skills "to deal with the complexity of data—the analysis of it, extracting value from it, and governing it."

Soft Skills
Analyzing the data is only part of the process, though. McDonald noted that as finance and accounting employees analyze data, they may need to collaborate with business units on the analysis, communicate their results to other departments, and work with those departments to formulate a strategy based on their results. That has placed increasing importance on soft skills, he said.

Chuck Eldridge, senior client partner at staffing firm Korn Ferry, noted a recent trend of companies appointing as CFOs executives who have operating experience as well as finance knowledge. 

"They want people who thoroughly understand the business," Eldridge said. "Companies are demanding that skill set."

That knowledge about the business can be acquired through programs that rotate employees from finance jobs to operating positions in business units and then back to finance, he said.

But another aspect is being able to source and analyze data about the business. "Everybody has to bring, in their toolbox today, those kinds of unique business analytics," Eldridge said.

CEB, an advisory firm, recently did a study of the skills of almost 4,000 finance and accounting workers worldwide and found that the biggest gaps were in three areas: leadership and management skills, which it terms "builder competencies"; communication skills, which it calls "persuader competencies"; and strategic skills, a category that includes business analytics and an understanding of the business environment.

Finance departments traditionally hired people with strong technical skills in areas like finance or treasury, said Eisha Armstrong, a senior director at CEB. "But as our businesses are becoming more complex and finance is becoming more automated, it's these builder, persuader, and strategic skills that are in most demand and where our teams tend to have the largest deficiencies."

Companies are investing more in training finance staffers, after having cut back on training during the recession, said Armstrong, pictured at right. "But I'm also seeing kind of a re-examination of 'What are the competencies that we can develop through training, and what are the ones where we have to think more creatively about how we hire, how we coach, how we do on-the-job learning?'"

For example, leadership skills take "a very, very long time to develop" if they're not innate, she said. "Certainly we're seeing CFOs revise the way they hire to look for leadership potential earlier on in someone's career."

Armstrong cautioned that hiring employees with the desired skills doesn't necessarily solve the problem if the position those employees fill isn't configured correctly.

"We still see very, very talented finance professionals coming in and perhaps being put in a role where they're still being asked to do lower-value work, still having to put out a lot of fires, so they're not getting the time to do the analysis," she said. "More of our CFOs are asking less for help on 'What are the skills I need?' and more on 'Once I get these people, how do I design their roles so we can maximize the skills they have?'"