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We here at CFO Brew spend a lot of time reporting on the talent shortage: how hard it is to find, train, and keep quality finance and accounting professionals. But there’s another side to that story: How do finance professionals find good jobs that offer security, stability, and opportunity?
To help navigate the pitfalls—and positives—of the job market, we’ve collected some of the best career advice LinkedIn cheat sheets that we’ve found over the last month.
Our usual disclaimer to the wise: You should always look for additional resources and expertise when doing complicated finance (or career) work because it can be very difficult to accurately sum up sophisticated concepts in a single cheat sheet.
With that said, take a look at these useful finance cheat sheets CFO Brew recently found on LinkedIn.
- Ryan Donaghy, “7 ways senior finance/data professionals can show their value in interviews.” Let’s not kid ourselves; job interviews are a sales pitch, with you and your experience as the product. Ryan Donaghy, a specialist English communications skills coach, offers up seven tips and practical examples of how to execute them for senior finance professionals to show off their “unique value” during interviews, valuable lessons as hard-to-demonstrate intangible soft skills become more in-demand for finance professionals.
Donaghy suggests starting by considering the question: What does the interviewer want? Answering that to yourself allows you to follow his second piece of advice to emphasize the experiences and characteristics that make you uniquely suited to meet those needs. Other advice includes highlighting leadership experience, being concise, and sharing your career development. - James Perry, “8 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before Pursuing a Career in Accounting.” Much is made of the challenges of an accounting career and whether to pursue a CPA license. Perry, an accounting exam and career mentor based in Northern Ireland, runs down simple, but easy-to-overlook benefits of an accounting career.
For example, he addresses what he calls the “popular belief [that] says accounting is all about number crunching” by pointing out that consulting and advice now constitute most of an accountant’s role. He also notes that accountants “are always in demand” and that “accounting is almost recession-proof.” (Those two things alone tempt us into a career pivot!) - Aleksandar Stojanović, “5 habits that stop CFOs from growing.” Career development isn’t just about looking for a job (says Capt. Obvious) but also about thriving in your current role. Stojanović, a fractional CFO and FP&A advisor, charts five career development roadblocks for CFOs and offers advice on how to avoid those pitfalls to “[reach] their full potential.”
Among the growth blockers he lists are outdated skills, working in silos, resisting working from home, not utilizing data proactively, and sticking to conventional revenue models. He then dives further into each of these challenges with insight on how to approach or avoid them. For example, to remedy outdated skills, he advises that CFOs “be more analytical, focus on value, and storytelling.”