Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a cpa and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A CPA is very vital in any organization as they play a diverse and complex financial management role! All types of businesses rely on the Certified Public Accountant to budget, audit and analyze the company's financial status due to their extensive knowledge of the finance department.
Their main tasks are: preparing and analyzing financial reports, Auditing financial reports for compliance, reviewing the company's financial status to ensure there are no discrepancies, overseeing the budget and financial management, preparing bookkeeping records, government audits, taxes, and fiscal planning, Recommending methods for organizations to save money, ensuring tax returns are submitted on time
Core Skills Required to be a CPA
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
A cpa should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Critical Thinking:
Critical Thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally while understanding the logical connection between ideas in a reflective and independent thinking.
A CPA will always seek to determine whether the ideas, arguments and findings do represent the entire picture while identifying, analyzing and solving problems by deducing consequences from what he knows and making use of the information gathered.
Innovation:
Innovation is the process of translating new invention into a service that creates value or brings better solutions that meet the requirements.
A CPA ought to introduce innovation in their business to help save time and money giving a competitive advantage to grow and adapt the business in today's marketplace as well as creating more efficient processes and ideas with a likelihood for your business to succeed.
Accuracy:
Accuracy refers to the closeness of a measured value to a known value or standard that is passed by the governing laws.
A CPA has to always be accurate with figures and data used and required in the office without any guesswork or estimations to facilitate precise and correct information in every department creating an authentic environment that will be respected by the workers.
Knowledge of Company Processes:
Knowledge of Company Processes is the in-depth understanding of a collection of related, structured activities that serve a particular goal for a group of customers or clients who are valuable to the enterprise.
A CPA ought to maintain consistency across the daily processed while keeping a keen eye on the overall plan of the organization by ensuring the company processes are performed and followed.
Appraisal and Evaluation Skills:
Appraisal and Evaluation Skills are services that allow employers to assess their employees? contributions to the organization for the period they have been working with them.
A CPA must creatively develop a robust evaluation process that includes the standard evaluation form, approved performance measures, guidelines for presenting feedback and disciplinary procedures to promote staff recognition and rewarding following a fair assessment and appraisal process.
Initiative:
An initiative is the ability to assess and initiate things independently often done without any managerial influence offered.
A CPA must train his workers to take up tasks without being asked to and work on them without being supervised to a quality that is accepted by the company, therefore nurturing a skill that grows the individual and the group as well.
Personal Relationships:
Personal Relationships is the relationship between individuals who have or have had a continuing relationship of any nature either professional or informal.
A CPA reserves the right to take prompt action if an actual or potential conflict of interest arises concerning individuals who engage in a personal relationship that may affect terms and conditions of employment and he should not also date a subordinate.
Deadlines - On time:
Deadlines - On time is the ability to prioritize the important tasks and setting up a plan on how to work on them first to deliver within the set period.
A CPA must have the art of managing deadlines by being able to prioritize the work that is set for scheduling to the workers according to how vital the projects are and how soon they need to be executed and submitted.
Financial Management:
Financial Management is the skill of learning how to handle accounting, finance, and organizational management through providing daily data on the operations that take place every day.
A CPA ought to be highly effective in planning and organization, controlling and management of the financial resources to achieve the company's organizational objectives that are laid down to see the growth of the enterprise.
Knowledge Management:
Knowledge Management is the ability to manage knowledge and information that is presented to the company from different sources without overlooking any of them.
A CPA ought to creatively channel all the new information, tools, input, and methodology mean by actively practicing the art of knowledge management within the business by harnessing the organization's inherent wisdom's platform in one place.
Hard Skills Required to be a CPA
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
A cpa should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.