Chicago Finance Jobs 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.

Six Keys to Being Happy

According to the Topgrading Professionals, the keys to being happy have been summarized below after asking executives: “How would you live your life or manage your career differently, if you could start over?” This question answers the question, “What might you have done differently in order to become a happier person?

They have heard similar responses over and over again, so here is a summary of the six keys to becoming a success in your career and life, a truly HAPPY “A” Player.

1. Fix broken pieces in your life now, or they will get worse.

Life components include the following: Relationship with Spouse/Significant Other, Relationships with My Children, Wellness, Career Success, Financial Well Being, Giving Back, Being Creative, Fun Hobbies, and Spiritual Satisfaction. Look at any that you would rate Fair or Poor since these items are detracting from your happiness and fix them!

2. Invest time, energy, and love in your family.

You can’t go back in time. Spend the time with your family and loved ones now.

3. Pay attention to wellness.

Half the people, particularly during their 30s and 40s, said their exercise, eating, sleeping and stress-relief habits could be improved.

4. Live within your means.

If you are financially living out of your means, then poor choices happen especially when considering job changes. Save and invest, so you have the money you need during the down times.

5. Plan your career early.

85% of the high achievers were self-made, so get mentors early who can help you think long term for your career plans. Get needed training early on in your career.

6. Topgrade.

“A” players work 50 rather than 70 hours, and get a lot more done in the process. Having these additional hours each week give them time to devote to family, exercise, or anything else that is important to them. High achievers achieve balance through Topgrading.

For additional information www.topgrading.com/

Temporary and Contract Work Booming! 6 Reasons to Consider Temporary Employment

As the job market continues to recover from previous unemployment rates, it appears that temporary and contract work is booming. Why is this? Employers are more willing to take on temporary employees as a way to find great employees and quickly fill staffing requirements while still maintaining employee skill sets. Temporary work is also an excellent option for those who are in between jobs or looking to gain career experience in a new organization.

Here, we will discuss the reasons why you should consider temporary employment and how you can benefit from this arrangement.

Learn New Skills

A temporary job is an excellent way for you to learn a new skill, especially if you need that new skill for a full-time job for which you wish to apply down the road. The new skill could be technical, physical or in the leadership field. Simply watching others around you in all of the temporary jobs you work will help you pick up on some new things you can leverage when applying for jobs elsewhere.

Flexibility of Scheduling

Flexibility is a key benefit of working temporary employment. Those who work in temporary jobs will find it very easy to arrange their schedule. This means that when you need to take time off, you can take a break in your career. As a temporary worker, you do not have to file a request with your employer for time off. Instead, you simply do not schedule another job to start until after your schedule is open again.

Make a Life Transition Easier

Life transitions, such as moving to a new state, are very difficult for some people to make successfully. Working temporary jobs can make a life transition easier for some. A temporary job will help a newly relocated person learn the culture of the area, learn what the job environment is like and much more. This will make it easier to accept a full-time job down the road because you will know what to expect on the job.

Temporary Often Leads to Regular Full-Time Position

It is quite possible that a temporary job could turn into a regular full-time position one without you even knowing it. Some companies hire temporary workers with the goal of keeping them on full-time if you are a good culture fit with the organization. The thing is, the company does not always know an opening will come up, so the employee will not know that this is a possibility. This is why you must put your best foot forward as a temporary worker.

Increase Your Network

Why not meet some new career contacts while earning a paycheck? If you love to network, temporary employment is an excellent way to do it. By working at a new company every couple of months, you will be able to add countless new people to your network. This will help improve your chances of landing a regular full-time job.

Earn Respect Within the Industry

An excellent way to earn respect within the industry is by working temporary jobs. You not only meet scores of new people, but you also build a reputation within the industry as a hardworking temporary employee. For all you know, a former temporary employer might contact you in the future for a full-time job.

There are plenty of reasons why you should work temporary jobs these days and we only touched the surface of them above. Find out more by connecting with the accounting recruitment specialists at Casey Resources.

The Importance of Proofreading Your Resume (and Other Crucial Adjustments)

When applying for a new job, candidates must do a handful of things to ensure that they make a positive first impression on potential employers. One of those things is sending in an outstanding resume. One critical step that must take place is proofreading the resume, to avoid any mistakes, grammatical errors, or other snafus that can cost a job.

As a job seeker, submitting just any old resume for a job could cause you to never hear back from the company. When you take the time to carefully proofread your resume, you vastly improve your chances of receiving a call for an interview. Remember, the main purpose of a resume is to get you that first interview opportunity! Let’s dig deeper into why it’s important to proof your resume and make any other crucial adjustments now.

How to Proofread Your Resume

The best way to proofread your resume is to read it aloud. When you read a document aloud, you are more prone to find any mistakes made in your grammar and punctuation. Have someone you trust proofread your resume as well in an effort to find any other issues that you might have missed. Once you proofread your resume, make sure you fix all of the mistakes found immediately. Another tip is to review your resume backwards to help catch misspellings on it.

Checking the Resume for Attractiveness

You might not think this is important, but it is vital to your success at finding a job. The resume must flow well and should not have any mismatched font types or font colors. Your resume needs to have a format that is very easy to read because employers do not have time to search the resume for your most important information. Typically, an employer wants to see a chronological resume listing your last position first.

Using Keywords Related to the Job Search

Your resume should use keywords that are related to your job search in order to get the attention of potential employers. Many companies use automated programs to sift through resumes submitted for open jobs, which is why keywords are just as important on a resume as they are when writing content for the Web. Do not over-stuff your resume with keywords because this will just be viewed as spamming. Make sure you include relevant skills that your new employer would be looking for in an employee. Does your resume match the job description of the position you are applying for to attack the interest of the hiring manager?

Focus on Clear Accomplishments

To secure a job interview and then an offer of employment, focus on your top accomplishments and don’t be afraid to brag about yourself. You can do this by editing your job descriptions from passive wording to active wording. This will help you explain the accomplishments you enjoyed at previous jobs in your career. Quantify your successes and achievements either in money or time saved for the company or income brought into the organization.

Using the Most Relevant Job Info

Including your entire career story will not help on a resume, and you should select information that’s relevant to that job posting. You do not need to include jobs from right out of college if you have been in the working world for more than 10 years. Instead of worrying about how long your resume is, you should be focused on the relevance of your resume when proofreading it.

Proofreading your resume is an important part of the job search process. If you submit a resume that is full of mistakes, there’s a strong likelihood that you will never hear from an employer again.

Casey Resources provides a number of services for clients and candidates to be successful in their job search. Contact a leading staffing firm in Chicago to learn more today.