Sept. 13, 2023

Bonus Episode 64: Mastering Evolving Career Skills in the Financial and Accounting Profession

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Ever puzzled over how your career skills need to evolve as you climb the ladder in your financial and accounting career? Join us as we delve into the transformation from mastering technical skills to becoming an effective communicator, strategist, and organizational leader. Also, as the year-end approaches, it's time to review your 2023 accomplishments and begin strategizing for 2024.

Please connect with me on:

1. Instagram: stephen.mclain
2. Twitter: smclainiii
3. Facebook: stephenmclainconsultant
4. LinkedIn: stephenjmclainiii

For more resources, please visit Finance Leader Academy: financeleaderacademy.com.

On the website, you can download the Become a Finance Leader Guide. You can use this guide to build your Finance Leadership skills so you can help senior leaders develop and execute the strategy.
I also offer a course, Advance Your Finance and Accounting Career: Developing a Promotion Strategy that Sets You Apart.

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Transcript

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Hi, this is Stephen McLain of the Finance Leader Podcast.

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This is Bonus Episode Number 64.

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This week I am doing a quick check-in with everyone.

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Next week I will share an episode on the importance of communicating to your team on how much of an impact they can have.

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I think this will help your team understand how their role shapes the company and positively influences how the company operates.

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It's important to show your team members how their daily responsibilities can make a huge difference.

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Many may not even realize the impact and influence about the work they perform every day.

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I want to share one important thought this week.

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As you grow in responsibility and in the type of role you have, what skills you develop and utilize must change.

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We start off our finance and accounting careers with the hopes of becoming the technical and knowledge experts For example, how to organize information in a chart, how to process our journal entries and month-end close, how to do a simple projection or how to prepare the profit and loss statement and many other entry-level skills and tasks.

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Our technical skills defined us.

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We could pull some information and put together some analysis.

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Our daily focus was on completing or assigned routine tasks and some analysis that may not even have fit together in a larger sense.

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As we become more senior, our skills range expands and our focus must shift.

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We go from a technical expert to a better communicator, to a strategy expert and then to organizational leader.

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Our focus initially goes from learning about the company, then to being an industry expert.

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We start out learning simple analysis and reporting and then we move on to more advanced projections and modeling.

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Once we have developed our individual technical skills and in order to transition to finance leader, we have to grow our critical soft skills as we advance.

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Our tasks become more conjoined as we help shape and execute an organizational strategy.

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What are the next set of skills that you need to develop for the career stage you are hoping to advance to?

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I have spoken about skills development many times and I want to talk about it even more as this community develops and to the finance leaders, I know that you all can become more to come on this topic in the future.

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Also, how are you on your goal accomplishment for 2023?

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It's almost that time to start thinking about what you did accomplish and did not accomplish, so you can start shaping up your 2024 plan.

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And here is another reminder about accomplishing any missing CPEs for the year.

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Don't wait until December to start.

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I hope you have a great rest of your week and weekend.

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Get some rest and enjoy the change in seasons, if that is happening where you are at.

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Thank you for listening to the Finance Leader podcast and please visit financeleaderacademycom for more resources.

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Take care.