11 Top Resume-Boosting Skills in Finance That Help You Stand Out
Publié le 28 October 2024
Get the attention of hiring managers and leading companies in a competitive industry by knowing 11 top resume-boosting skills in finance that help you stand out.
Finance professionals hoping to make a job switch this year or in the future will need to brush up on their resumes or risk getting left out in the cold. You can be the perfect candidate and get lost in the sea of applications simply because you didn’t format or phrase your resume properly.
If you’ve been job hunting for a while and haven’t had any luck, even with a perfectly optimized resume, it’s time to return to the drawing board and learn new skills. But sometimes, it’s also a matter of knowing which ones to highlight on your resume.
With this guide, you’ll know the top skills in finance that will help your resume (and your experience) stand out from the competition.
What are Finance Skills?
The job market in 2024 and beyond is a mixed bag. The accountancy sector, for example, has seen an 8% increase in job postings, while the banking sector has seen a 3% decrease. These numbers shouldn’t discourage you too much, however, as there are still plenty of open positions being marketed overall; it’s just that the overall sector’s growth does seem to be slowing down.
Regardless of hiring trends, however, it’s critical you brush up on your resume with the skills that will help you stand out the most because there will always be role-specific finance skills that depend on your career.
If you work in financial planning and analysis, for example, then you’ll need financial modeling, data analysis, financial forecasting, and accounting skills. As it’s a holistic approach to strategic financial management, you will also need many soft skills, including communication, attention to detail, critical thinking, and decision-making.
If you want to remain competitive in the job market, you must develop both hard and soft finance skills. You’ll then need to know how to accurately put them down on your resume so that hiring managers understand each skill’s value.
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The Importance of Licensing and Credentials in Finance
Thanks to credentials, hard finance skills are straightforward to acquire. In Canada, for example, you’d need to get certifications from Canadian financial institutions like the CFA Institute or Financial Planning Standards Council. In the United States, there’s the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants or the Institute of Management Accountants.
Since financial roles are certified you must make sure your certificate allows you to work where you live. An American certificate means nothing in Canada and vice versa.
Make sure you not only have the certifications you need and that they are up to date, but include how you’ve succeeded in your role. Even something as simple as saying how you’ve successfully led and completed four consecutive auditing periods with your employer can help you stand out.
Of course, it isn’t just hard skills that matter. You also need interpersonal skills and other soft finance skills to take those technical abilities of yours to the next level.
11 Top Resume-Boosting Skills in Finance that Help You Stand Out
If you want to boost your resume and career, you need two things. One is a knockout resume. The second is knowing which skills are the most in-demand in the financial sector today. If you don’t have these finance skills yet, now’s the perfect time to invest in them.
1. Integrated Business Planning Experience
There are many benefits of integrated business planning in the financial sector, and the best part for job seekers is it’s not a skill that requires certification but experience. Integrated business planning itself works to unify business strategy and planning, budgeting, and forecasting to improve the decision-making process.
Putting all that information together accurately requires specialized skill sets—skills that help businesses across sectors, including the financial sector itself, reach their financial goals.
To help those skills stand out, focus on the end result of your project efforts, or, if you leave before it’s finished, round up what you’ve done and how you’ve helped progress the project to date.
2. Accounting Skills
There are a range of skills that fall under the umbrella “accounting” and regardless of whether you are a chartered accountant or not, they can help you with your job search. If you aren’t a chartered accountant, for example, you can boost your resume by showing:
- General ledger skills
- Knowledge of cash flow management principles
- Mathematics skills
- How to use accounting software
- How to use financial models
- How to reduce operation costs
- How to analyze data
- How to put together financial reports
- And more
All financial professionals should have a basic understanding of those key account skills, even if they aren’t chartered accountants themselves. Include how you use those skills in your day-to-day, either in your resume, your cover letter, or even in person during the interview.
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3. Decision-Making Skills
Decision-making skills play a crucial role in any career and work well alongside other finance skills like accounting, reporting, and bookkeeping. Prove how you’ve made data-driven decisions by outlining your leadership and outcomes. If you worked towards strategic decision-making projects, include your contributions.
Informed decision-making can happen as part of a team or individually. Regardless of how you’ve made or contributed towards decisions in your company, outline those instances in your resume. This will highlight your leadership potential and your ability to extract actionable insights from data.
4. Data Management Skills
Hands-on experience with data management is invaluable in the finance sector, especially if you have experience with must-have technology like SAP data integration solutions. With AI tools now becoming the norm, the need to manage data has never been greater.
If you have previously worked to integrate data sources into a single source of truth and know how to extract actionable insights from data, then you can absolutely use those technical skills to stand out in the job hunt.
Even regular data management in accounting is invaluable in the financial sector (or, alternatively, in the individual finance departments or teams of each business). If you understand data management principles and know how to get valuable insights from data in any way, put it on your resume, alongside any specific data management technology expertise you may have.
5. Management Skills
Leadership skills, project management skills, and interpersonal skills are three of the most crucial soft skills for career development. If there’s one skill for finance professionals hoping to further their careers, it’s this. Invest in management and leadership training, or try to take on leadership roles in your current role.
In your resume, you’ll want to highlight instances where you led people or projects. This can help you get roles like financial manager or fund manager, even if you haven’t necessarily worked as a manager beforehand.
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6. Commitment to Development
One of the easiest ways to stand out as a candidate is to prove your commitment to lifelong learning. Regularly take courses, earn certifications, attend workshops, talks, and more. Even reading books can do a lot. Stick any credentials you’ve earned in your resume, and put the rest that you’ve learned on your continuous learning journey on your LinkedIn to start discussions and show your passion for your industry.
7. Communication Skills
One of the soft skills in finance that cannot be stressed enough is communication. You need to be able to make cloud calls with key stakeholders and simplify financial jargon so everyone understands what you are talking about and what is happening.
Corporate finance executives and stakeholders do not necessarily need to have a background in finance themselves. If they do have one, they may be unfamiliar with your specific focus. Effective communication, simple terms, and knowing how to command a meeting will take you from a worker to a leader.
If you have communication skills, you need to include them in your resume. Rather than just jotting down a little note under your skills list, however, make sure to include examples of your communication skills.
You could say:
- Developed and delivered clear, concise presentations that consistently achieved stakeholder consensus on strategic initiatives.
- Negotiated favorable contracts with key clients, increasing company revenue by 22%.
- Communicated complex project details to non-financial stakeholders, achieving 85% project buy-in.
If you can, highlight the precise value of your skills in hard numbers, which is known as the achiever approach. If you are a manager, ask your employees to answer a questionnaire or poll to get explicit approval number ratings that you can add to your resume.
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8. Financial Literacy
If you work in any role in finance you absolutely must have a solid foundation in reading and understanding financial statements, but more than that you need analysis skills to make use of that information. To highlight this finance skill, include how you used financial statements, reports, and other sources of research to make decisions. If possible, include the result of those informed decisions.
9. Financial Reporting
Alongside communication, you also need financial reporting skills. Financial reporting importance cannot be stressed enough. Without sound financial reporting skills, finance teams cannot give critical stakeholders the necessary information. Financial reporting is also used to obtain a deep understanding of records, make better decisions about the company moving forward, and, most notably, prep your business to sail through audit periods.
Knowing how to put together a balance sheet, income statements, cash flow statements, and more may not seem like a critical skill, but it’s one that you can use to help you stand out. Never underestimate the basics when it comes to your career journey. Dotting your Is and crossing your Ts is imperative in finance and data analysis, so put your reporting and documentation skills in your resume.
10. Regulation and Compliance
If you have practical experience meeting the strict compliance standards set out by regulatory bodies, include it. Finance has no wiggle room when it comes to meeting compliance requirements, so put those technical skills front and center in your resume.
Do remember to be as specific about which regulations you have experience with, as these will matter in your job search.
11. Technical Experience
If you have technical skills that involve anything from AI to enterprise resource planning, include them. Many financial teams struggle because their business has yet to optimize its data. Will you strictly get a job in finance if you focus on your technical skills? Not necessarily, unless your skills are in using tools like financial modeling software, but it can help you work in a critical capacity for a financial firm.
How to Improve Your Resume
For your resume and application to succeed, you need to focus on more than just the financial skills you include, but how you say them and even how you’ve formatted them. Many businesses use AI-powered resume checkers to create a shortlist of applicants. If you aren’t on that short list then you’ll be rejected automatically.
So, how do you improve your resume?
- Use a standard resume format: Standard formats are easier for machines to read and understand, improving the chances of your resume being sent.
- Match the language of the job description: Include the terms, phrases, and keywords from the job description in both your resume and cover letter.
- Include a cover letter: Cover letters, especially if they are specific to the company, help you stand out immediately. Some businesses even request them just to see who is serious about their application, and who isn’t.
- Always include specific information: Fill your resume with stats as often as you can. This is the achiever resume approach and it’s very effective.
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Key Takeaways
Many skills can help you enhance your resume. Many top skills are also universal, meaning you likely already have experience and just need to jot it down, or learning it can help you no matter where your career takes you. Communication and decision-making skills, for example, can help your career flourish in absolutely any role.
By knowing 11 top resume-boosting skills in finance that help you stand out, you will be able to get the attention of hiring managers for the right reasons. This will boost your chances in breaking into the financial industry.
