At medium- and large-sized companies there is frequently a group that HR and senior management refers to as "Hi-Po's", that is, High Potential employees. It is quite literally the top percent or two of any large organization who have been identified as those with the greatest potential to have an outsized impact at the company.

Once identified, those "Hi-Po's" tend to get a disproportionate share of professional development budget and opportunities sent their way. They may get to go to special senior level, strategic meetings internally and they tend to get more live training with travel. Companies really go out of their way to develop these folks to their maximum potential and, hopefully, retain them over the long term so that they can get an ROI on that incremental development investment.

Okay, so that top 1% are treated differently due to their, well, high potential. But what about the other 99%? You can't afford, in time, money or exposure, to give the same development opportunities to everyone. And at many companies that 99% gets some perfunctory "it's the same for everyone at the company" professional development resources. Frequently this takes the form of generic learning platforms with generic content.

Well, in the Office of the CFO, it's both easy and within budget to do much better. Let's face it, the 99% collectively do a lot more work than that 1% by itself, and investing in them makes all the sense in the world, even if it's at pennies on the dollar. A 5% move in capability for the 99% group can have a far greater impact than improving the top 1% by 25%. 

To see what can be done effectively, with the staff and budget you have now (or less), check out our whitepaper on Serving the 99% in Your Finance and Accounting Organization.