Accounting Jobs Chicago IL Archives

Tips to Advance Your Accounting and Finance Career

Every company needs accounting and finance professionals. This provides virtually endless opportunities to advance your accounting and finance career.

Whether you are just starting out or have many years of experience, learning from other professionals in your field is an effective way to advance your accounting and finance career. These suggestions may help.

Choose among these six tips to advance your accounting and finance career.

Find a Mentor

A professional in your field who has more knowledge and experience than you likely faced issues similar to yours. As a result, this professional can share their knowledge and provide insight to help overcome the issues that you might face. You can ask for advice and feedback to continue moving forward in your accounting and finance career.

Network

Build relationships with recruiters, hiring managers, company leaders, HR employees, and other professionals in your field. You can ask these individuals for ideas, advice, and guidance on your accounting and finance career path. They may share job openings with you, serve as employee referrals, or meet with you about opportunities that fit your skills, goals, and interests.

Learn New Technologies

Staying current on the use of technology helps advance your accounting and finance career. This includes enhancing your proficiency with Excel, using business intelligence tools such as Cognos or Crystal Reports, and understanding accounting systems such as SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, or Oracle.

Gain Experience in Different Fields

Invest time learning different areas of the industry to develop your accounting and finance career. This may include bookkeeping, preparing financial statements, financial reporting, internal auditing, compliance, or taxation. Changing your job duties every 2-3 years lets you gain the knowledge, skills, and experience needed to stay competitive.

Become a Certified Public Accountant

Earning accreditation as a certified public accountant (CPA) shows you have high-level industry knowledge, skills, and ethics. This certification demonstrates your commitment to the field and ability to take on higher levels of authority.

CPAs are in great demand because they enforce higher standards for the accounting industry. These professionals perform highly specialized job functions that provide significant value for employers. This provides the potential for high salaries and growth for your accounting and finance career.

Focus on Specialization

Develop your skills in a specific area to advance your accounting and finance career. These areas may involve regulatory compliance, anti-money laundering (AML), Know Your Customer, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review, or the rules related to capital adequacy and consumer protection under the Dodd-Frank Act. High-level knowledge and experience in any of these areas are valuable to employers.

Find a New Accounting and Finance Job

Finding a mentor and networking help you gain valuable guidance to advance your accounting and finance career. Learning new technologies and gaining experience in different fields help you stay competitive in the job market. Becoming a CPA or focusing on a specialization let you provide additional value for an employer.

Work with Casey Accounting & Finance Resources to find your next role. Learn about our job opportunities today.

11 Costly Blunders to Avoid in a Job Interview

Performing your best during a job interview includes practicing what you want to say and how to say it. You want to demonstrate your skill set and top accomplishments in a confident, personable way. Avoid diminishing your abilities and downplaying your success by avoiding these costly missteps.

When scheduling your interview, make sure you can fulfill your commitment to be at the interview at the designated time and arrive a few minutes early.
Make sure to dress your best (even if the company has a casual dress code), leave your phone in the car, dispose of the gum and don’t drink coffee during the interview.
Don’t write “see resume” when completing an employment application.
Don’t ask about working from home or what the benefits will be during the initial stages of the interview process.
Keep answers relevant and to the point. Don’t be long-winded. If you do all the talking, the interviewer will not be able to determine your ability to do the job by asking key questions.
Listen! Don’t answer a different question than the one they actually ask you.
Don’t talk over the interviewer.
Have questions ready to ask about the company based upon the research you have done.
Do not complain about your previous employer.
If you are interested in the position, let the interviewer know you are interested and what the next steps will be in the interview process.
Don’t write a thank you note to the interviewer while still on the job interview! Wait until after the interview and send a thank you note to express your interest in the position and to thank them for the interview.

Schedule Your Next Interview Today!

If you’re ready to start your job search, contact the recruiting experts at Casey Resources.

Retaining the Right Talent

“How can I help you be successful?” When the only differentiator in your organization typically is your talent, these words carry significant meaning when such a small percentage of the workforce feels inspired to do their jobs every day. Many more feel coerced or actually fear the organization.

Finding out what inspires your employees, and connecting their roles within the organization to their purpose and motivation will help you retain your top talent. Below is one of Gallup’s 12 question employee engagement questionnaires to help in taking the initial steps of determining employee engagement.

The Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Questionnaire

Do you know what is expected of you at work?
Do you have the materials and equipment to do your work right?
At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
At work, do your opinions seem to count?
Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
Do you have a best friend at work?
In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
In the last year, have you had opportunities to learn and grow?

Source: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/pages/0510fox3.aspx

Gallup, Inc. https://q12.gallup.com

Salary Expectations for Illinois Accountants and How to Negotiate Yours

Are you preparing for a job as an accountant in the state of Illinois? If so, this post is for you because we will discuss the salary expectations for accountants working in Illinois. We will also help you negotiate your salary, and it doesn’t matter if you are right out of college or preparing to make a move well into your career.

Accountant Salary Rates Rising in Illinois

The national average for an accountant’s salary is just over $47,000 per year. In Illinois, there are just nine major locations where an accountant’s salary is less than the national average. There are 21 major locations where the salary is more than the national average.

If you want to work in Chicago as an accountant, you can expect to make roughly $2,000 more than the national average for the position. The same can be said for those who want to work in Evanston and Orland Park.

If you want to work in Peoria, you can expect to make roughly $5,000 less than the national average. The same can be said for those who want to work in Springfield and Rockfield.

How to Negotiate for the Best Salary

After looking at the numbers for an accountant’s salary in Illinois, it is now time to figure out how to negotiate your own compensation. The first step in this process is putting together a list of your top priorities for the job. Write down 401(k), vacation time, benefits, base salary, bonuses, scope of responsibilities, frequency of performance reviews and more.

Ask the hiring manager what the base salary for the position is and then provide a counter offer. In some instances, the offer made by the company will be the final dollar amount. In other instances, you will be able to negotiate the salary to a level that you think is acceptable.

One thing you must do prior to negotiating your salary is research. You need to figure out what the company has paid for the position in the past, what competing companies pay and if you have any degrees or certifications that would increase the salary paid to you.

As you prepare to work in the accounting field, you need to make sure that the salary is in line with your experience and prior compensation levels. A little bit of research can help in your negotiations for a higher salary at a new company.

5 Skills to Highlight in Your Accounting Resume

As you prepare to write a resume for your accounting career, it’s important to consider what to include or omit. Your resume will look different depending on whether you are right out of college or have been working for 15 years. Use the tips below to develop an outstanding accounting resume so that you will get noticed by the right hiring companies.

Discuss Technical Skills

One of the most important things you need to include on your accounting resume is that of your technical skills. Technical skills include proficiency in SAP, Oracle, Sage, and other high-level tools. Any financial software you know how to use should be listed on your resume in order for you to stand out from the crowd.

Include Accomplishments

What have you achieved in your previous employment? Show that what you have done in the past. Highlighting your accomplishments shows that you can take on more responsibility and be able to generate results. You won’t settle for doing average work.

Quantify Your Success

To tie in with those mentioned accomplishments, how strong was your success? Being able to show that your work resulted in an improvement of performance or a decrease in expenses for an organization shows that you will increase efficiency and be able to keep everything running smoothly.

Ability to Prepare Financial Statements

Another skill you should feature is the ability to prepare financial statements. Financial statements have many different segments and you need to discuss all of them on your resume. You need to show that you can handle the income statement, the balance sheet, the statement of retained earnings and the statement of cash flow.

Financial Analysis

The most successful accountants out there today are able to explain how well they perform financial analysis. When you work in financial analysis, you need to be detail oriented. If you want to find a job in the profession, your resume will need to have just as much detail, if not more. If you cannot properly define this skill on your resume, it will be difficult to land a job.

As you build a new resume, you need to highlight the skills mentioned above if you want to impress the hiring manager and receive an offer of employment. Work with your recruitment representative at Casey Accounting & Finance Resources to create an accounting resume that will work for you.