Discover the range of skills that you need to develop before considering a career in the sector
Among one of the most fundamental finance skills that nearly each financial services aspirant requires to establish should revolve around their accounting and financial knowledge. Many people often tend to believe that accounting and finance skills are just required if you are seriously thinking about an occupation in accounting. However, as William Jackson of Bridgepoint Capital would know, the financial industry environment is interrelated, and every position within financial services requires you to understand the three main financial statements to a minimum of an intermediate degree. Businesses depend on these financial statements to manage budgeting, performance assessment, and determine the expense of operations through the selection of the most suitable economic investments that might include bonds, stocks and real estate. This is why you see many finance professionals, coverage analysts, or even wealth managers coming from a formal accounting background, which is primarily because of the foundational understanding accounting and financial services can offer you prior to you specialise in your financial career.
Nowadays, among the most obvious hard skills in finance would definitely involve your numerical abilities. Numbers and quantitative data overall are the core of any finance occupation. As Ferdi van Heerden of Momentum Global Investment Managers would know, numerous financial institutions tend to employ their interns, interns, or apprentices from quantitative degrees, such as mathematics, financial services, chemical engineering, and information technology. This is because, as an economic analyst, you are required to analyze lengthy data sets that are filled with numerical data that you will require to analyze, and being comfortable with numbers is absolutely a vital tool to have in this situation. One could suggest that even back-office positions that do not necessarily include spreadsheets still call for applicants to have some level of numerical or analytical experience, and this again reinstates the fact around numerical information being the cornerstone of each process within a financial services sector organisation these days