CFO development comes from exposure far more than formal training: owning a raise, presenting your own board pack, managing people, and a mentor who tells you the truth. CPA Australia requires 120 CPD hours per triennium, but most content targets people already seated.
The gap nobody funds
There is so much learning and development content out there for CFOs, but very little for everyone at the levels below that. That is the state of the market. Once you are in the seat, the executive programs, the peer roundtables and the vendor-sponsored content all find you. Before that, when it would actually change your trajectory, you are largely on your own.
The other half of the gap is exposure. Most of the market operates in the SME bracket, and many finance professionals there miss out on career-triggering events like IPOs, capital raising, mergers and acquisitions, or dealing with regulators, and often lack mentors who have navigated such high-growth or unusual situations. Only proximity to the people who have lived it fills that hole.
It is the reason I started The CFO Track. The whole idea behind the pod is to give up and coming finance leaders the learnings and development that they might not have had the opportunity to otherwise. Free and unpaywalled.
What each format is good for
Every format on this list has a use. What kills people is picking the expensive one to solve a problem that a conversation would have fixed.
Mentoring does the heavy lifting
Of everything on that list, mentoring is the one I see change outcomes most reliably. One finance leader put it plainly on The CFO Track: when you are starting a role you have never done before and feel you lack the skills, having a mentor who can be a raving fan on the sideline is critical for boosting confidence and combating self-doubt throughout your career. That is not a soft benefit. Self-doubt is what stops people applying for the seat they are ready for.
Peer communities do similar work for a different problem. Most senior finance leaders carry a version of self-doubt internally, but few express it aloud. A room of people at the same altitude is often the only place that conversation happens.
The CFO Track podcast is where I put this into practice, with Australian finance leaders talking honestly about how they got there.
The curriculum nobody teaches
If you are choosing what to develop, choose against where the market screens. The most important skill for finance professionals is the ability to communicate and business partner, working with the wider business so people act on the real meaning of the numbers. Technical skill gets you in the door for a senior finance role. Stakeholder skill is what keeps you in it.
Storytelling is the concrete version of that. At final-stage interviews, candidates who can deliver the story through a case study presentation or a real discussion about board packs make a significant difference. If you want one thing to practise this quarter, practise presenting a board pack to someone who is allowed to interrupt you.
The other live curriculum item is AI, and it needs a governance frame rather than a tools frame. My one rule is that AI produces a first draft, not a final answer. A qualified person checks every number and signs off anything that reaches a board, investor, auditor, client or regulator, so accountability stays human. The finance people I speak to worry about signing off something that turns out to be wrong, not about being replaced by AI.
Tom Hunter's view: That changes what juniors need to be taught, not whether they are needed. As I said on Builders & Doers, “in Australia in accounting the university numbers have actually dropped by about 50% over the last 10 years,” but because things are being streamlined it's probably good timing, and “learning the basics is definitely very important and debits and credits and understanding what good looks like and so you can sense check something.” (Builders & Doers, September 2026; video at 27:26)
For the full list of what founders and boards actually screen for, see the CFO skills and qualifications breakdown.
What to do about it if you lead a team
For CFOs and Heads of Finance reading this from the other side: the development gap under you is a retention problem before it is a capability problem. A lack of career progression for capable finance professionals is most of the time not due to their capability. Hard work is visible in a finance career, but ambition often is not, so the proactive conversation has to come from somewhere. If you are not having it, someone else eventually will.
Common questions
What training does a CFO actually need?
Less formal training than most people assume, and more exposure. The technical base is usually already there by the time someone is a candidate. What gets tested is judgement, communication and the ability to hold a room, and those develop through owning a capital raise, presenting your own section of a board pack, hiring and managing people, and having a mentor who will tell you the truth. Executive programs help most when you need a credential or a cohort, not as a substitute for that exposure.
Is an executive education program worth the cost for an aspiring CFO?
It depends what you are buying. If you need the credential for a listed-company track, or the cohort and network for a pivot into general management, a university executive program can be worth it. Founders want evidence you have raised capital, led a team and sat in a board meeting. Spend the money on getting closer to those things if you can.
Where can aspiring CFOs get development if their employer will not fund it?
This is where the gap sits. There is a large amount of learning and development content aimed at sitting CFOs and very little for the levels below. Free routes that work are mentoring, peer communities, and long-form content where practitioners explain how they actually solved a problem. The CFO Track podcast exists for exactly this reason: to give up-and-coming finance leaders the learning and development they might not otherwise have access to.
How should finance leaders develop their teams on AI?
Frame it as governance rather than tooling. The rule worth teaching is that AI produces a first draft, not a final answer, and a qualified person must check every number and sign off anything that reaches a board, investor, auditor, client or regulator. Finance professionals worry about signing off on something that is wrong, not about being replaced by AI, so the training that lands is about where the human check sits rather than which tool to buy.
These guides set out how we see it, drawn from the searches we run and the finance leaders we work with. They are general information about the market, not financial, accounting or legal advice, and they are no substitute for advice on your own circumstances.