In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the demand for talented compliance staff. Demand for GRC skills and expertise has grown exponentially, and at a time of increasing enforcement activity, skilled professionals are scarce on the ground. For many organizations, upskilling an existing workforce is one of the most workable solutions, but how do you retain the much sought after skills once you’ve produced them? The compliance function is under more pressure than ever before, and senior executives have great expectations. In such a fast-moving environment, organizations need to keep their valued compliance staff to ensure business continuity. The compliance function has changed in recent years and has moved from a back room operation to a central player, key to the success and growth of the organization. Experienced compliance officers are expected to be involved in a wide range of activities and the skills now required for compliance officers include leadership, understanding business lines and products, operational change management and the ability to deal with regulators. There is far more pressure on compliance professionals to track and analyse regulatory developments, and to be able to quickly assimilate their impact. The combination of skills which financial institutions now require can be hard to find in the first place, and is becoming increasingly difficult to retain. Senior executives will need to think carefully about how to retain talent which, in many cases, they will have trained. In future, compliance staff will have higher expectations about their career development and will look at the opportunities both within the business and elsewhere. Businesses will need to distinguish themselves as a good place to work, do more to show they appreciate and value compliance staff and must plan carefully how they will retain the talent they need. In this podcast we speak to Basem Al-Issa, the Deputy Managing Director of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. Basem is responsible for training and career development at KPC and has responsibility for over 30,000 employees and contractors, a massive task. We asked him how he found his key compliance people, how he held onto them, and what he thought were the core skills that would help safeguard the company for the next 10 years at least.