Pursuing a career in finance is your first step towards an extremely lucrative future in The U.K. With a wide range of financial products, institutions, and positions, there is never a shortage of people needed in this industry. Being able to see how money truly works, in the context of the system you’re a part of, is invaluable to the entire corporate world. If you’re planning on getting into finance, it can seem daunting. However, we are here to help!

There are still some primary skills that you need to have. Some are technical skills that you pick up in school or through experience, others are soft skills that can push your knowledge and your point further. Here are some of the skills necessary for a career in finance.

Accounting

No matter what aspect of finance you are interested in, you need to know the principles of accounting. Some may find it redundant and some might find it unrelated to what they’re trying to achieve. In the end, everybody in the finance world has some experience in accounting. Lucky for you, there are a whole host of tools on the Internet that can help you with this. For instance, you don’t need to bring out the entire Oxford Dictionary of Accounting to figure out value-added tax. You can click here to use the VAT calculator of your dreams and be immediately ahead of the curve. You just have to be resourceful, smart, and in-tune with the very basics of accounting. Nevertheless, you need to know. 

Financial Reporting 

Financial reporting is by far the most important skill in dealing with bosses, stakeholders, and potential investors. The ability to take all that heavy knowledge, and distill it into something not only agreeable but attractive, is what separates the money men from the department heads. What people wanna know is how the money situation is doing. You could have stakeholders from completely different fields. They need to know, based on the way you present information, the state of their money. You can have as many graphs and as many charts as you want. Being able to verbalize exactly what’s going on is the real skill. 

Basic IT Skills

Everybody in finance should have some knowledge in IT. We’re not working with pen and paper anymore. We’re working with software, apps, and email. Knowing a thing or two about how they operate will not only help your IT department fix the problem, it could help you avoid that service call altogether. Your friends in IT are busy going all around the building, turning printers on and off, amidst extremely complicated system based problems. Giving them a break by knowing what an error code is isn’t going to hurt. In fact, they’ll love you for it.

The skills mentioned above are just a few out of the hundreds that you could potentially focus on. These are, of course, the main three that will get you ahead in any financial institution or project. Know your way around accounting, be ready to present, and find ways to help mitigate system issues. Hone that and you’ll be CFO in no time.