Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a tax advisor and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A Tax Advisor is an expert in providing commercially focused tax information and assistance to a wider range of customers who operate in any sector of the economy. This position allows you to come up with tax efficient strategies for multinational and domestic based clients in a variety of business situations. It also helps in monitoring and anticipating tax legislation changes while responding quickly with the specific advice for their customers.
Other important tasks for this position include advising and consulting with clients to provide information about tax legislation, helping businesses come up with strategies for dealing with tax so they can prepare for the future financial market, advising on aspects of property transactions that include acquisitions of foreign property.
Core Skills Required to be a Tax Advisor
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 tax advisor should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Presentation Skills:
Presentation Skills are useful in getting your message or opinion out there in many aspects of life and work, though they are mostly used in businesses, sales, teaching, lecturing, and training.
A Tax Advisor must develop the confidence and capability to offer excellent presentations and captivate the audience when the need arises; it requires a lot of preparation to stand out from the crowd, and a manager should be willing to invest in it.
Motivating others:
Motivating is using persuasion, incentives and mental or physical stimulants to influence the way people think or behave individually or in groups.
A Tax Advisor ought to learn how to tap into the employee's enthusiasm as well as motivate the staff not just with money but with a motivation that comes through the daily relationship with each employee and creating an environment that fosters employee engagement and motivation.
Team Building:
Team Building represents various types of activities used to enhance social relations and define roles within the different teams at the workplace.
A Tax Advisor ought to provide team building activities to his team to cultivate better communication, morale, motivation, productivity and help employees know each other better as well as their strengths and weaknesses to be used in building a better workplace.
Potential for Advancement:
The potential for Advancement is the ability to make something better by being more skillful, more efficient, and more useful to produce high-quality results.
A Tax Advisor needs to invest in his employees by creating room for individual advancement that encourages stronger job performance because it positions the employees to demonstrate just how well they can perform their jobs through motivation and feedback that are critical to the employee performance.
Seeing Potential Problems:
Seeing Potential Problems is the ability to structure the current situations and identify developments that could cause problems in the future.
A Tax Advisor needs to see potential problems before they occur and work to stop them early enough, he also has to stay ahead of the flow not to be caught you by upcoming issues that could be easily prevented if they were noted soon enough.
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 Tax Advisor 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.
Time Management:
Time Management is the capacity for an individual to assign specific time slots to activities as per their importance and urgency to make the best possible use of time.
A Tax Advisor must schedule each task within a stipulated period for each employee and ensure all the tasks are completed promptly thus actually teaching the staff the value of time and how to utilize it for the interest of the business and their growth.
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 Tax Advisor 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.
Research:
Research is the ability to stay updated on the latest trends in different fields as per your concern or the concern of your company or business.
A Tax Advisor ought to stay up to date on the latest trends in hiring, leading, retention, technology and much more by using the newest research methods that allow him to make better decisions and improve productivity.
Mechanical Skills:
Mechanical Skills are the abilities to solve problems that arise in the workplace, although it may vary from one company to another.
A Tax Advisor must be well equipped with technical skills to handle any underlying mechanical problem that may arise from wrong scheduling to meeting unique customer needs, budget, legal constraints, environmental and social issues, technology changes and any other management requirements.
Hard Skills Required to be a Tax Advisor
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 tax advisor should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.