4 Skills Accountants Can Demonstrate in Year End Reviews, Resumes, and Interviews

Every accounting job is different. Your role could range from auditor to advisor to controller or CFO. Even if you have the same title as someone at another organization, chances are your roles are drastically different.

While no two accounting jobs are the same, there are often core skill sets that finance leaders look for in their team members.

In this article, I outline 4 skills accountants can try to highlight in their annual reviews, resumes, and interviews. Whether it’s achieving a promotion or landing that dream job, demonstrating these qualities should enhance your chances of excelling within your careers.

1) Operational Experience

Operational business skills are a must-have not just for accountants, but for anyone looking to succeed in business. While each role, level, and company vary, there are certain universal operational competencies you can highlight in your reviews/applications, including:

• Communication and collaboration skills, especially with other departments within your organization (HR, operations, etc.) and outside parties (clients, vendors, customers, etc.).

• Resolution of issues and, most importantly, how you learned from them.

• Ability to set and meet deadlines, especially while juggling multiple projects at once.

• Coaching and mentoring team members.

• Leading (or even just participating as a member) of a team or project.

2) Technical Accounting

We all know there are too many rules and complexities in accounting. No one is an expert in everything, but when highlighting your skills, you can consider:

• Any expertise you do have, such as specific industries, areas of accounting guidance (GAAP, IFRS, etc.), or processes/operations (like month end close, AP, etc.).

• Ability to independently research accounting problems, draft conclusions, and effectively communicate results.

• Involvement in audits (either as the auditor or working for the company being audited).

• Financial reporting, including either (or both) internal management reporting and external/audited financial statements.

3) Process Improvement

Another skill for all types of roles (not just accounting), being able to leave a process or procedure in better shape than how you found it demonstrates strong process improvement skills. Items to highlight could include:

• Being able to quickly learn how a process is currently being executed.

• Identifying process issues and proposing smart solutions that improve efficiency and effectiveness, ranging from “quick wins” to wholesale changes.

• Implementing easily-transferable solutions, including the ability to document procedures in a digestible format.

• Demonstrating the ability to think critically and creatively.

4) Initiative

I wrote two blog posts last year for Beyond Discovery Coaching where I did a deep dive on how to demonstrate initiative earlier and later in careers. When I personally refer to initiative, I’m focusing on the ability to independently take charge of your work and set yourself apart from your peers, which can be demonstrated by:

• Making your manager’s lives easier by volunteering to take things off of their plates and proactively “managing up.”

• Proving you can “get stuff done” by taking your tasks to completion. This doesn’t mean you need to have all the answers, but making sure your questions are smart and thoughtful.

• Holding yourself accountable for both successes and failures and demonstrating you’ve learned lessons from those failures.

• Involving yourself in internal company or firm initiatives (social committees, coaching programs, training programs, etc.).

Check out those two posts (here and here) for more details!

Very Few People Get an A+ in Each Area

While being able to demonstrate both experience and excellence in all four of these areas would be amazing, very few people score A+ grades in each of these, and, especially for job applications, that’s perfectly OK (and normal).

Maybe you’re a rockstar technical accountant (A+) but have limited operational and process improvement experience (C+). Or maybe you’re a generalist who has a decent level of experience in all four areas but you're not an expert in any one area (i.e., a B grade in all four).

The combinations of skills and experiences can be endless, and each organization is going to weigh these differently. While not being perfect in any of these areas is OK, just remember to demonstrate some level of competency in lower-grade areas, strong expertise in higher-grade areas, and that you are constantly learning and growing.

A Couple Other Things…

As noted above, every role and organization can be different, so certain managers will value certain skills, and organizations will have their own set of core competencies that are favored more than others. For example, client service skills (which heavily rely on communication and collaboration), are extremely important in audit and advisory but may be less applicable in industry jobs.

Additionally, there are PLENTY of other skills worth building on throughout your careers.  These are just four skills that I personally saw in many successful accounting colleagues that I wanted to share.

Finally, each of these skills are dense and have many subsections. I’ll be addressing each one individually in upcoming blog posts, so stay tuned for more related content!

Feel free to email me with any questions or follow/message me on LinkedIn or Instagram for more content.