Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a credit control analyst and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A credit control analyst deals with consumer or commercial credit activities. He/she analyzes and controls credit activities from when a loan is offered to its repayment. They act as the custodian of the company ensuring that credit is only offered on merit and that the repayment is made in time and according to the terms.
Other duties include checking the credit status of the customer and reviewing information about the commercial or individual customer, in determining if they are suitable for credit. He/she is also involved in the development of the credit control system, determines the terms and conditions for payable and receivable balances and is also responsible for maintaining contact with the customers to ensure debts are paid in time. He/she also reports to the management on the debt situation of the company among other functions as required by the employer.
Core Skills Required to be a Credit Control Analyst
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 credit control analyst 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 Credit Control Analyst 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.
Administrative Skills:
Administrative Skills are all the services related to the running of a business or keeping an office organized while supporting the efforts of the management team.
A Credit Control Analyst must develop these skills and emphasize the administrative skills to ensure high-level responsibilities that range from planning large scale events to creating presentations and analyzing financial data are handled carefully and efficiently.
Knowledge of Job:
Knowledge of Job is essential to every employee who needs to have a clear understanding of how their jobs fit into the overall organization to eliminate carelessness and laxity.
A Credit Control Analyst must be able to evaluate this criterion when selecting an employee and know the common descriptions of a person with either right or inadequate knowledge of the job early enough to either keep them or let them go.
Office Politics:
Office Politics is a tool that assesses the operational capacity to balance diverse views of the interested parties of the human interactions that involve power and authority.
A Credit Control Analyst is meant to pay attention to the organizational politics while creating the right political landscape that lubricates the organization's internal gears without focusing on personal gain rather focusing on the corporate profit that will benefit everyone.
Managing Remote Teams:
Managing Remote Teams is working under no physical supervision from your manager or supervisor while staying on task and communication to report on the daily progress.
A Credit Control Analyst ought to nurture, guide and support the employees to do their job right without compromising on the quality and wasting the allocated time to grow the team and the company as well.
Competitiveness:
Competitiveness is the skill of being able to compete as a team or a company with other enterprises in the same line of entrepreneurship and emerging as the winner.
A Credit Control Analyst needs creativity in setting the pace for the organization on the policies and factors that determine the level of productivity of their enterprise against their competitors leading to the growth of the business and the income.
Self Awareness:
Self Awareness is the ability to have a sound understanding of who you are as a person and how to relate to the world in which you live by understanding your strengths and weaknesses and how to manage them in the workplace.
A Credit Control Analyst must creatively know how to administer the workforce diversity by understanding the culture identity, biases, and stereotypes and become more aware on how he reflects his thoughts, feelings, and behavior towards the staff.
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 Credit Control Analyst 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.
Intercultural Competence:
Intercultural Competence is the knowledge and skills to successfully interact with people from other ethnic, religious, cultural, national and geographic groups.
A Credit Control Analyst 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.
Process Improvement:
Process Improvement is the creation of new processes or improving the existing ones that will work and take your corporation to the next level.
A Credit Control Analyst must maintain the continuous improvements in the workplace that are favorable to the current investors, potential investors, and stock owners while working with methods that can serve as a foundation for future business decisions causing a profitable growth.
Hard Skills Required to be a Credit Control Analyst
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 credit control analyst should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.