Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a financial services officer and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A Financial Services Officer is liable for guiding buyers through the process of buying financial instruments like bonds, retirement plans and working out the procedures and regulations as well as connecting them with the sellers.
The primary roles for this post include collaborating with clients to customize financial product requirements, providing financial to customers and providing optimal customer relationship, analyzing credit worthiness of assigned portfolio directly with credit analyst, maintaining knowledge on market financial and credit services both for existing and new, preparing documentation to open and operate new business and consumer deposit accounts, developing customer base by optimizing cross-selling services and products, collaborating with clients to customize financial product requirements.
Core Skills Required to be a Financial Services Officer
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 financial services officer should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Conflict Management:
Conflict Management is a situation where the interests, needs, values and goals of the involved parties interfere with one another in the workplace where different stakeholders have different priorities.
A Financial Services Officer must learn to recognize and deal with disputes in a rational, balanced and practical way through effective communication, problem-solving abilities and outstanding negotiating skills to restore the focus of the company's peace.
Innovation:
Innovation is the process of translating new invention into a service that creates value or brings better solutions that meet the requirements.
A Financial Services Officer 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.
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 Financial Services Officer 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.
Collaborating with others:
Collaborating is willingly working with one another and cooperating in whatever task one is assigned without behaving poorly or having an attitude change that hurts others.
A Financial Services Officer is meant to collaborate with all workers and management both male and female without causing frustrations or sidelining any worker or delaying their promotion from any informal conversations where most decisions are often made.
Dealing with Difficult People:
Dealing with Difficult People is learning how to tactfully calm down an obnoxious person who is either verbally attacking you or stealthily criticizing you or your professional contribution.
A Financial Services Officer must learn how to combat and tone the demanding customers or staff who are competing for power, privilege or spotlight which defy logic not with fights but with the truth and more listening skills as well as lots of patience.
Evaluating Others:
Evaluating others is the capacity to see the individuality in others and recognize a person's unique point of view.
A Financial Services Officer must master the skills of evaluating others to help his staff members to identify their talents and match those talents to the proper job without trying to judge them by their actions that can create a misinterpretation of who they are.
Long Range Planning:
Long Range Planning is setting long-term goals and objectives for your business or project to ensure its growth and sustainability is reached by all the employees.
A Financial Services Officer needs creativity in defining long-term goals that ought to be proactive, putting together a full employee focused management strategy that analyzes the major initiatives and translates them into functional goals that employees handle.
Resource Use:
Resource Use is the ability to utilize the office supplies effectively while avoiding any wastage and ensuring everything is used correctly.
A Financial Services Officer needs to educate his employees on the rising threat of global warming and the business's risk of high expenses to avoid wastage of any kind from copiers, computers, old filing processes and data backing disks that are sometimes misused by the employees.
Business Ethics:
Business Ethics is the ability to learn what is right and wrong in the world of business and choosing to do what is right at all times.
A Financial Services Officer must emulate good business ethic that is essential for the long-term success of an organization by implementing an ethical program that will foster a thriving entrepreneurial culture while increasing profitability and personal maturity.
Intercultural Competence:
Intercultural Competence is the knowledge and skills to successfully interact with people from other ethnic, religious, cultural, national and geographic groups.
A Financial Services Officer should have a high degree of intercultural competence that enables him to have successful interactions with people from different groups as well as train his employees to be sensitive to the cultural differences and be willing to modify their behavior as a sign of respect for each other.
Hard Skills Required to be a Financial Services Officer
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 financial services officer should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.