Across Global Business Services, the centralized finance, HR, and IT operations that serve much of the corporate world, and a major professional employer in Malaysia, job descriptions have quietly fallen out of step with what the work now demands.
The finance analyst I hired five years ago and the finance analyst I need today aren’t the same person. Same title. But if I look honestly at what the role actually requires now versus what it required when I last wrote the job description, I’m looking at two different jobs. Most GBS functions I speak with haven’t fully reckoned with that yet, and the ones that haven’t are quietly accumulating a problem that gets harder to fix the longer it sits.
This isn’t only a hiring issue. Global Business Services (GBS), the centralized teams that run finance, HR, IT, and procurement for large organizations, and a model Malaysia has spent two decades building into one of the region’s busiest hubs, is being reshaped by technology faster than the people inside it can be retrained. It’s a people issue and an organisation issue at once. Any job written around a specific set of tools or a fixed way of working is, right now, quietly drifting out of step with what the business actually needs from it.
The job description is sending the wrong signal
When I ask GBS leaders how recently their job descriptions were substantially rewritten, the honest answer is usually that someone added a line about digital tools or system proficiency, and that was considered current. It wasn’t. Updating at the margin isn’t the same as reconsidering the role from the ground up.
A job description is the first signal a candidate receives about what an organisation values. If that signal hasn’t been updated to reflect how much the work has changed, the organization ends up selecting for a profile that fits the job as it was rather than the job as it’s becoming.
The more useful exercise is to take any active job description and ask a simple question: if I were writing this for the first time today, knowing what I know about how the work has changed, would it look like this? In almost every case I’ve seen, the answer is no.
What the role actually needs now
When I look at what genuinely differentiates strong performers in GBS functions right now, it isn’t a particular qualification or a specific system they know how to use. What I see consistently in the people adding real value is a continuous improvement mindset. They come in with enough exposure to various technologies that a new tool arriving doesn’t unsettle them.
Continuous improvement mindset, technology exposure, and the disposition to be mouldable as things change need to move from the bottom of the requirements list to the top. Not as aspirational language buried in a paragraph about culture, but as actual evaluation criteria that shape who gets hired.
The obligation runs in two directions
Here’s where most organizations get stuck. They frame the upgrade as either a talent acquisition problem or a learning and development problem, and address one without the other.
Rewriting job descriptions without investing in existing people creates a split within the function. Going the other way, expecting existing people to upgrade themselves without updating the structure around them, puts the obligation entirely on the individual.
What works is treating the two as connected. The job description sets the new expectation, the development investment gives people a real opportunity to meet it, and the performance conversation closes the loop by making growth a visible part of how contribution is evaluated.
Where to start
The organizations making progress on this aren’t waiting for a formal workforce transformation program. They’re starting with the next hire. They weigh adaptability and learning orientation more explicitly in the hiring conversation. And they’re having a parallel conversation with people already in those roles about what growth looks like in the new version of the job, framed as an investment in where the function is going rather than a performance management exercise.
The ones still waiting for the right moment to start that conversation are, in the meantime, hiring people into jobs that were written for a world that’s already moved on.
The technology will keep changing. The role needs updating. So does the person in it. In my experience, the organizations making real progress are the ones who stopped treating these as separate conversations.
Chang Te Sheng is Head of Digital at AGOS Asia, a GBS and digital transformation advisory firm based in Kuala Lumpur.
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