The Finance Leader Podcast

073: Finance and Accounting Career Trends for 2022

January 18, 2022 Stephen McLain Season 9 Episode 3
The Finance Leader Podcast
073: Finance and Accounting Career Trends for 2022
Show Notes Transcript

You need to stay current with what is happening in the Finance and Accounting fields so that you can address your skills gap to remain competitive. I will continue to recommend that you learn leadership since that will remain critical to advancing your career. The nature of work is changing, and that means we have to change also.

Episode outline:

  1. What the future is,
  2. Identify and grow your skills gap,
  3. Career trends for 2022, and
  4. Learning leadership will set you apart.


Please email me at contact@stephenmclain.com if you have any best practices with accounting for blockchain or crypto. I will give credit in the podcast for all submissions.  Thank you!


Please connect with me:

1. Instagram: stephen.mclain
2. Twitter: smclainiii
3. Facebook: stephenmclainconsultant
4. LinkedIn: stephenjmclainiii

Consider joining The Finance Leader Podcast Community Facebook Group, where we can talk leadership and the other topics I present here on the podcast. https://www.facebook.com/groups/financeleaderpodcast  This is a good time to jump in and start sharing ideas and thoughts about leadership so we can help each other.

For more resources, please visit stephenmclain.com. On the website, you can download the Leadership Growth Blueprint for Finance and Accounting Managers. You can use this guide to develop your leadership by focusing on communication, and growing and empowering your team.

You can now purchase a course to help you advance your career from financeleaderacademy.com. It's called Advance Your Finance and Accounting Career: Developing a Promotion Strategy that Sets You Apart.

Stephen McLain:

This week I'm going to highlight some recent finance and accounting career trends, along with recent trends and the nature of work itself, going into 2022. We need to stay current with what is happening in the field so that you can address your skills gap to remain competitive. I will continue to recommend that you learn leadership, since that will remain critical to advancing your career. The nature of work is changing, and that means we have to change also, please enjoy the episode. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host Stephen McLain. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. Please consider following me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. My usernames and the links are in this episode's show notes. And also please join the Facebook group I have for this podcast community. Thank you. This is episode number 73. And I will be talking about finance and accounting career trends in 2022. And I will highlight the following topics. Number one, what the future is. Number two, identify and grow your skills gap. Number three career trends for 2022. And number four learning leadership will set you apart. Legendary baseball catcher Carlton Fisk said, it's not what you achieve. It's what you overcome. That's what defines your career. This week, I'm going to cover a few career related trends, especially about the nature of work, and how we are approaching work. We have to know the trends and realistically try to figure out what the future may be. What skills do we need to learn and what is the future of finance and accounting, at least for the near term. We need to perform this exercise regularly because it may force us or at least influence us to update and maybe change our goals. My focus for today is looking specifically at 2022. And we may need to consider a little beyond that. First, I want to ask how your goal planning is going for this year. Any progress so far? Are you getting any results? Are you getting the right things done? I don't want you to be busy just to be busy. We need to focus our effort in the right way and direction. Also, what is your next personal event or milestone for this year? Is it a spouse or child birthday, or an anniversary or a graduation? Don't forget the events at your child's school like sports or clubs. And don't forget parent teacher conferences. Make sure you have these events on your calendar and attend them. You have to get this right in your life. I talked about this after the New Year and episode number 71. Last week in Episode 72, I asked you to start keeping a daily journal to record your thoughts, your struggles, your wins, and where you want to go. This can help you tremendously to help you define who you are and what you want to achieve. The nature of work continues to change. COVID is largely responsible for that people are working from home and wanting to continue that. For the most part workers don't want to return to the office. People want flexibility around work hours and where they can work. They want more flexible benefits and benefits. That makes sense. They want an approach to work that makes sense for this century. And our current challenges. People have more complex family arrangements that traditional work requirements do not support any longer. I have another question to consider. Why are people quitting in high numbers they are quitting. In the United States we are seeing record numbers who are quitting. They are mostly from the hospitality industry. But the belief is that this is not an isolated feeling for this industry alone. People want more work life balance, they want more flexibility and people are burned out by the stresses of the COVID 19 pandemic and they want more pay for what they are enduring and for the risks they are dealing with on a daily basis. I will continue to ask you to ensure your professional background is relevant and up to date, you must ensure your entire professional portfolio is competitive. By professional background I mean your professional certification, your advanced degree, your business acumen, your technical skills level, your executive presence and your mindset. This is important. You have to continue to work on these areas, you will always need a good mix of soft and technical skills. Key soft skills are necessary to advance in our profession. We are always dividing our focus between becoming the technical expert and also realizing we need to work on our communication skills for example. These are all important as we rise in role and response ability, we need to strengthen our soft skills, and our technical skills must be more strategic in nature. I don't need a CFO to be practicing spreadsheet skills. But I do need that CFO to know how to effectively communicate the company's future to investors. The importance of learning leadership will never decline and will be more valuable than ever. Leadership is key to advancement. I believe that you must know how to properly motivate people without using toxic methods. This takes more skill than in the past, because past leaders would often use coercion instead of communicating a vision for where they want it to go. Coercion is very detrimental to your team. Additionally, the business world and life in general is more complex today. This is why leadership skills will be in demand for those seeking higher roles and responsibility. Further, I am asking you to apply leadership in everything that you do. Every technical requirement requires a leadership approach from how we conduct monthly close to how we talk with and positively influence decision makers in our organization. Leadership is knowing where we are today, and where we want to go tomorrow and applying what we know. So we can create a pathway to achieve it. We all have to know where finance and accounting is going. So we stay relevant and stay competitive. Where are we going? We know the nature of work is changing, but also the technology keeps evolving to automation and cloud computing and cloud based applications will dominate the future. More finance and accounting requirements are expected to be outsourced. As we may move away from an organization to a service based company that provides the same services the finance and accounting industry is changing. This is not the time to be complacent about our careers. Industry changes will require you to change to adapt and to be resilient. Now let's talk about a few finance and accounting career trends in 2022. Number one, what is the future the finance and accounting profession continues to evolve. Our industry is changing and we need to change and adapt. Also, we will see more cloud based applications, overall cloud based services and more advanced artificial intelligence. So if your value resides and how well you put together a spreadsheet, you will need to grow beyond that to stay competitive, we are going to continue to see a shift in skills for analysts and staff accountants, I can see analyst pulling pre formatted reports, most of your time will be spent on analysis and communicating what happened. Instead of running a data inquiry, pulling data, and then formatting data in a spreadsheet. So it's usable by decision maker staff accountants will see a similar trend as cloud based apps will record financial transactions. And if you're accustomed to pulling data into a spreadsheet, where you populate a formatted journal entry, which you then enter into another system, well, this is going to change to for some companies, this change has already happened. I will talk more about this in a few weeks. But we all need to know about blockchain and crypto, and how we will need to account for it in the financial statements. Today, I really don't have a lot of answers. These are topics that are being discussed by the industry and also by central governments because they are trying to figure out what blockchain and crypto means being able to oversee it, and also on how to tax it. So we need to continue to be observant and watching where this goes. Does your company working blockchain or accepts crypto for payment? Please share with me at contact at Stephen McLain comm if you have any best practices to share, that email address will be in the show notes for this episode. I won't talk about web three just yet. But web three may very well change how we use apps and our data more on this later. I do want to address that this forum is a leadership development forum. So as a leader in finance and accounting, you need to know what the future is and how to apply new technology to what your organization is trying to accomplish. Number two, identify and grow your skills gap. As the industry changes, we need to assess our skills and close that gap as quickly as possible. So we can remain competitive, you will be evaluated for how you add value to the business. I have mentioned this before. You must continue to add value not just to compile some reports, or to send emails or numbers or to submit a journal entry or to each month but how are you helping the company fulfill its mission? Every task I mentioned may be necessary in the entire list of tasks. But where are you making a difference where it gets noticed? If people are not noticing your work? You may not be seen as someone relevant in the workplace, and share your learning about emerging technologies that will affect our industry, and also the cross train. If you practice accounting and share, you can perform financial analysis. And the opposite is true to gather and grow your skills across the fields. You will also need to grow your analytical and communication skills, so you can add more value to decision makers and also to know how to effectively communicate that value. Number three career trends for 2022. The nature of work continues to change employers and companies want their teams to return to the office, employees have realized how much they love the flexibility and other benefits when working from home. office workers have embraced work from home opportunities and don't really want to return to the office for the most part. Working from home has provided more flexibility when raising children and managing their requirements. It means lower costs and fuel and car maintenance, and many other benefits. We have proven that working from home does work, the workers have shown how much happier they are to have that flexibility. I have also read that headcount for accounting positions will be going up this year, I am seeing more open accounting roles as I scan job openings on LinkedIn and other job sites. Additionally, we will also see the need for more financial analysts, Treasury specialists and auditors. As these requirements are not shrinking anytime soon. Number four, learning leadership will set you apart. Becoming a leader will continue to give you an edge over your peers. Great leadership comes from the need to fulfill the organization's vision. And then to figure out how to do that embrace becoming a leader so that you emerge in your organization as someone who can provide clarity in the numbers and what they mean to the strategy. Additionally, leadership will be critical to embracing new technologies and how to properly apply them, which means teaching your team how to use them. But bigger than that, you may need to be the advocate for introducing emerging technologies to your company. Our industry is changing, it has always been changing, we will see more automation, more cloud computing, more outsourcing, our skills in our approach will have to change, you have to stay relevant and competitive. Now for action today, continue to stay current with the job market and how the finance and accounting industry is changing. Here are a few considerations. Address your current goals and ensure they make sense. Watch the current job market and qualifications that are listed. Do you have a skills gap? Do you have a plan to address that gap if you have one. Keep your LinkedIn profile current with your skills and experience. So you are ready for new opportunities. Are you aware of where finance and accounting is going in the future? I recommend reading from a variety of sources and also to see what is being offered on the job sites including LinkedIn. Today I talked about finance and accounting career trends in 2022 and highlighted the following points. Number one, what the future is number two, identify and grow your skills gap. Number three career trends for 2022 and four learning leadership will set you apart. Please continue to stay current on the finance and accounting career trends. Along with how the nature of work is changing. You need to know the trends so you can remain competitive, and also to evaluate your worth as it relates to what value you're delivering to your employer. The more knowledge you have, the more you can do to improve your situation. And the more knowledge you have about the industry and how it is changing, the greater the chance you will have to accomplish your long term goal. Stay current, watch the job market and see what skills and professional requirements are being asked. This will help you adjust your individual development plan as you go. Additionally, emerging technologies will require great leadership so they are transition into the organization properly. This is also why I emphasize learning leadership as part of your overall development plan. Next week, I'll be sharing what to do when you assume a new role. So you are set up for success. I hope you enjoyed the finance leader podcast dedicated to helping you grow your leadership skills to change your mindset to clarify your goals so you advance your career. You can find this episode wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, you can check out more resources at finance leader academy.com and sign up for my weekly updates. Don't miss an episode on the show. And now the lead your team and I'll see you next Started Thank you