494 CFOs just drew the finance team they’re building. Almost nobody drew a junior layer. It reads as efficiency. It’s a succession problem with a five-year fuse. Here’s what the pyramid-to-diamond shift means for who you hire now.
Give this a go… sketch your finance team three years out. Not the names, but the shape.
A few years ago, that sketch was a pyramid. A wide base of juniors, a squeezed middle, a single point at the top. Ask a room of CFOs to draw it now, and the base has gone. What you get is a diamond.
Oliver Wyman and the New York Stock Exchange put this question to 494 CFOs this spring. 64% expect their teams to shift away from junior roles. 41% expect the mix to move towards mid-level, only 13% towards more juniors. Their own words for what’s coming: a finance pyramid ‘flattening into a middle-heavy diamond’.
And this isn’t a headcount cull. 61% of the same CFOs expect headcount to stay flat or fall by less than 10%. The team isn’t getting smaller. It’s changing shape. The people are staying, but the bottom rung is going.
A diamond is a lovely shape for a finance function. Lean at the base, thick with experienced people through the middle, still pointed at the top. It looks efficient. It looks like exactly where the profession’s heading.
Until you ask the one question the workforce-planning slide skips.
Where does the middle come from?
The middle is grown, not found
A middle-heavy diamond assumes a supply of mid-level finance people who are already good. Commercial. Credible. Able to business-partner, able to hold a room when the numbers are ugly. Those people don’t arrive fully formed. They’re grown. And they’re grown by starting as exactly the juniors this survey says we’re removing.
The work a 24-year-old used to do by hand was never just output. The variance analysis. The reconciliations that taught you which suppliers were chaotic and which were precise. The board-pack assembly that showed you how leadership actually thinks, years before you had a seat at the table. The fifth draft of a forecast that taught you which assumptions held and which fell over under pressure.
That was the apprenticeship. It’s where judgement gets built.
And it’s the exact work AI does first.
This isn’t a projection any more
A while back I wrote about the staircase. Why the steps that build a finance leader are quietly being automated out from under them. This is the data catching up to that argument.
Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab put numbers on it late last year. Using payroll data from the largest provider in the US, Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues found that early-career workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations have seen a 16% relative decline in employment since generative AI took hold. Older workers in the same jobs, and workers in less-exposed fields, held steady or kept growing. The adjustment came through jobs, not pay. And it clustered in the roles where AI does the work rather than assisting with it.
It’s US data, and Finance sits squarely in the exposed set.
So the base of the diamond isn’t thinning because businesses turned cruel. It’s thinning because the first rung of the ladder is the easiest thing to automate, and the automation works.
The top of the diamond is already bidding against itself
The succession bill is already arriving.
Russell Reynolds’ latest Global CFO Turnover Index, out in May, recorded 316 new CFO appointments across listed companies in 2025. The highest in their seven-year series. Experienced CFOs took 43% of those seats, the biggest share they’ve ever measured. Interim CFOs are becoming more common too.
Read that in plain terms… boards are paying a premium for people who’ve already done the job, because fewer of them exist. When the proven bench thins, everyone reaches for the same faces, and the price of a safe pair of hands climbs.
Now stack the three findings on top of each other. The base is being removed. The apprenticeship is being automated. The market is already short of experienced leaders.
The diamond has a fuse.
Cut the bottom in 2026, and around 2031 every business that drew the same diamond goes shopping for the same mid-level hires at the same time, and finds a market that never grew them.
Why the mid-market feels it first
The Big Four will paper over this. They’ve got the scale to run structured programmes, fund mentorship, treat training as a measurable deliverable.
A 250-person PE-backed business hasn’t. It hires one or two trainees a year, if that. No graduate scheme to fall back on. So the quietest version of this whole thing, the one already sitting in mid-market hiring data, has nothing to do with junior unemployment. It’s a Finance Director in their fifties with no successor inside the business. It’s a PE house reaching for another interim because nobody internal is ready, even after years.
The institutes can see it coming. The ICAEW launched its biggest overhaul of the ACA in three decades last September, weaving technology through every module rather than bolting it on. That’s the right direction. It’ll help.
It won’t fix the part that matters most. The qualification was never the problem… the learning surface was. And a redesigned syllabus doesn’t replace eighty month-ends.
What this means for the team you’re building now
One. Treat a junior seat or two as infrastructure, not overhead. The payback lands in 2031, not this year, the same way the data layer does. ‘Cheaper now, or unstaffed in five years’ is the actual choice you’re making. Make it on purpose.
Two. Change the junior brief. They’re not there to run the reconciliation any more. They’re there to check the machine that runs it. Verifiers, prompt-builders, output-auditors. Judgement built on interrogating a confident output, not repeating a manual one.
Three. Make mentorship real. Senior time in the diary, funded and measured. Not ‘if there’s a spare hour’. The learning that used to come free from the work now has to be designed back in on purpose.
Four. Read a mid-level shortlist differently. Three years of proper grounding, plus genuine AI fluency, plus calm in ambiguity, is rarer and more valuable than five more years of the work the machine now does. Hire for the middle of the diamond by finding people who can hold it, not people who look like the middle used to look.
Where this leaves you
A diamond is the right shape. That’s the frustrating part. Lean at the base, deep in experience, is genuinely where finance is heading.
The shape isn’t the mistake. The assumption underneath it is. That the middle refills itself once you stop hiring the bottom.
The mid-level finance leader of 2031 is a decision you’re making in 2026. The trainee seat you’re deciding whether to fund. The second-year you’re choosing whether to stretch. The analyst you’re either developing or quietly handing to an agent.
So when the next junior seat comes up and the tools can plausibly cover it, worth asking something better than ‘can we automate this?’
Try ‘if we do, who’s in the middle of the diamond in five years, and where did they learn?’
That question has a cost this year. It has an answer in 2031. The other one just leaves a gap.
Most of our week at Core3 goes on exactly this. Helping CFOs and investors design finance teams that still produce senior people in seven years, not just leaner ones now. If you’d like to think through what your diamond should look like, and which seats are worth protecting, drop me a line at [email protected].
