You may be looking at FP&A for the first time through the long lens of taxation, audit, and other disciplines. You may be coming from a non-financial background and considering the best route to take in a new career. You may be established on the FP&A career path and weighing your options for advancement. Wherever you find yourself now, what should your next steps be?
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Get interested in the numbers
When you’re sampling transactions for audit or running to tight monthly reporting deadlines that leave you little room to breathe, it’s easy to process the numbers without thinking through in detail what they are telling you.
Be curious.
Develop an interest in where the numbers come from instead of just producing them. Follow the audit trails and discover the people and the stories behind the transactions.
Show and tell
Take any and every opportunity to analyze those numbers. Build your skills using analytical tools and learn the tricks of the financial modeling trade. Look for the key trends and indicators that your models reveal. Dig deeper into the data sets, too. Getting an insight into what is and isn’t reported and what biases exist will help to build richer data for decision-making.
Don’t keep this work to yourself. Demonstrate what you're doing and share your findings. Collaboration and communication lie at the heart of a successful FP&A career, and by working together with financial and operation colleagues you build your skills as a professional and as a leader. Helping others to succeed is one part of the mindset of success.
Find the right mindset
That mindset is all-important as you develop your career. You need to focus on driving business value, generating insights, and supporting vital strategic decision-making so that management takes the right risks to grow the business.
This is a paradigm shift in focus that characterizes the most successful FP&A professionals. Planning and analysis have to deliver the breadth and depth of information needed to keep the organization on a steady path towards its goals.
Maintaining that trajectory requires a holistic view of the whole business and a clear understanding of how operations fit together and where the organization sits in the market and wider economy.
Consider certification
Not every FP&A leader has trodden the path of professional certification, but there is a clear thread of continuous learning that runs through all the accounts we hear. Certification - whether that’s CMA, CGMA, FPAC, MBA, or similar - offers more than just letters.
It helps you to develop new skills and broaden your outlook, challenging you to deeper thinking and exploration of concepts and ideas that you may not be exposed to in your working life. It helps you to stay focused as you dare to take risks and opens the door to a network of like-minded professionals and opportunities to further your career.
Take the first step
What will you do today to move your career forward? Look at those numbers again, in a new light. Tell your colleagues what you’ve noticed, and start the conversation. Consider how that insight might contribute towards driving value in the business. With that simple shift in focus, you have already made progress towards your goals.
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