Category: Career Advice and Training

For finance and accounting professionals, the summer slow-down is an opportunity to accelerate your career. By setting strategic personal development goals, you can sharpen your skills, expand your network and position yourself for future success.

Here are five summer career moves to help you advance during this quieter season.

1. Define Your Objective and Set SMART Goals

When choosing professional development goals, it helps to start with your long-term career aspirations and work backward to create smaller, actionable objectives. If your long-term goals don’t help, you can reference recent performance reviews for high-value growth and improvement areas.

Once you have a goal in mind, use the SMART goal method to ensure your summer career moves are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.

2. Identify Opportunities by Researching Industry Trends

The fundamentals of accounting and finance don’t change, but the industry and the economy do constantly. Stay ahead of the curve by subscribing to publications, following thought leaders or attending webinars or conferences.

Knowing the trends arms you with the ability to make strategic decisions about your professional development. Look for areas where demand grows, or disruptive technologies create opportunities.

3. Update Your LinkedIn Profile

If you haven’t paid attention to your LinkedIn profile in a while, this is a good time to refresh it. Highlight recent achievements, new certifications, or expanded responsibilities, especially if they align with your career objectives.

Take this time to request recommendations from colleagues and managers who have seen your new skills or improved performance in action. Keeping your LinkedIn profile up to date prepares you for unexpected opportunities and makes it easy to update your resume when you need it.

4. Nurture and Expand Your Network

You never know where your next opportunity might come from or who might be willing to recommend you. A robust professional network brings new opportunities, so include reconnecting with former colleagues and mentors in your summer career moves.

This quieter season is also an opportunity to expand your network and meet new allies. In addition to joining groups and attending events, consider offering your expertise or assistance to others. Your professional generosity can lead to mutually beneficial relationships and enhance your reputation.

5. Improve Your Work-Life Balance

Good self-care habits support your long-term success by keeping your mindset positive and your body energized. Summer is an outstanding opportunity to implement some routines and habits that make you feel better and think more clearly. They may include changes in diet, adding exercise, getting outdoors more, spending time with your favorite people, or getting your home or office organized.

Advance Your Career With Century Group

Don’t let this quieter season pass you by; take action to accelerate your career. If you’re looking for new opportunities, Century Group is here to help you make the right moves. Submit your resume today to start your journey.

A recent article published by Forbes Magazine emphasizes an often underappreciated point about holding executive jobs: it may yield great benefits, but it also causes significant stress.

Using the example of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, whose company is currently reeling from recently revealed trading losses totalling billions of dollars, the piece examines how executives can suddenly find themselves dealing with periods of particularly intense stress.

The article also cites a report from health.com investigating the unconventional health risks associated with different professions. Relying on input from healthcare professionals, the site offers a brief analysis of the risks posed to individuals who hold executive positions.

“We know that too many hours at work takes away hours that could be used for health-promoting activities,” explains Dr. L.Casey Chosewood, senior medical officer for the Total Worker Health program at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. “Often senior leaders have these very driven, type-A personalities – something that’s already associated with increased heart disease risk.”

Other types of office workers were also identified as having elevated risk of developing various conditions and diseases such as obesity, back pain, repetitive stress injuries and heart disease.

However, some stressors can be relieved by outsourcing services. For instance, working with corporate recruiters can help significantly reduce the level of stress experienced by your company’s executive team.

Especially if multiple positions are vacant and corporate leaders are simultaneously responsible for picking up the slack and searching for suitable replacements, the stress of keeping so many balls in the air at once can become overwhelming. Exhausted leaders can’t devote their full mental capacity to making important decisions, which can have serious ramifications.

That’s why it makes sense to share the burden with professional recruiters, who bring their experience and full-time focus to the task of finding high-quality candidates for a company’s open positions.

On the first day of the recent “D: All Things Digital” technology conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage for an in-depth interview with the event’s hosts. Discussion covered various topics, including Cook’s leadership of Apple, the legacy of his predecessor, Steve Jobs, and general trends in the technology market.

Cook appeared to be primarily interested in keeping the conversation focused on Apple’s product line, but he also had much to say on the subject of effective corporate leadership and team-building. He said he was working to preserve the innovative corporate culture at Apple and ensure that it remained a place where people wanted to work.

He also stressed the value of maintaining the loyalty of top people. “We have a privilege, because if I look around the executive team, many of the people are people I have been working with for double-digit years,” Cook said. But of course, in order to retain talented individuals, you have to hire them first.

One of the best ways for a company to ensure that it is filling its most important executive jobs with high-caliber individuals is to conduct searches in coordination with an executive recruiting firm. Working with professional recruiters adds an extra dimension to any given candidate search, as they bring an intensive focus and an unmatched level of experience to the hiring process. This allows them to ensure that applicants are thoroughly qualified and only selected for positions at companies where they can excel.

In fact, that’s exactly how Steve Jobs came to hire Tim Cook as Apple’s chief operating officer (COO) in 1998. Working with professional recruiters helped him identify the man who would not only govern Apple’s worldwide operations for over two decades, but ultimately succeed him as CEO. And, Cook continues to stand as a firm reminder of the value of working with a quality executive recruiting firm.

All business owners and executives know that reputation is important. Especially with growing consumer access to the internet, disreputable companies and individuals are subject to public ridicule and alienation from potential partners and customers.

However, a person’s character is every bit as important as his or her reputation, if not even more so, and the two may not necessarily match up perfectly. Reputation is all about perception: it only refers to what other people expect from an individual. A reputation may be hard-earned and accurate or it may be wildly off-the-mark. Any person could hypothetically have any reputation.

A warrior with a reputation for fearlessness may still turn and run from a dangerous battle. But, those with bravery at the core of their character would stand firm, regardless of the odds against them.

Therein lies the difference between the two traits. Character is all about what a person will do, rather than what other people expect of him or her. And, in business, it is the character of an executive that matters most.

Of course, leaders may often need to take into account the impact that their actions will have on their reputations, but organizations always need to carefully consider the character of any candidate who they are considering for a high-level office. Especially when it comes to filling jobs in finance, it is crucial to select individuals of great integrity to hold the most influential positions. That’s why it pays to always work with a firm of professional recruiters when conducting an important financial professional search.

The staff at executive recruiting firms have expertise in looking past people’s reputations to examine the character of each candidate. This helps a company guarantee that it is really hiring a high-quality performer, rather than a hyped-up pretender.

All business professionals want to work with other talented individuals. However, many employers may be unsure of how they can best go about motivating high-caliber workers in a way that builds their interest in the job and sense of loyalty to the company.

One highly effective strategy for maintaining employee loyalty is to give workers at least some level of control over their day-to-day situation. Whether it’s allowing flexibility in their time management or simply offering a channel for employees to voice their opinions to those in higher levels of management, making workers feel that they have a degree of influence over the direction of their jobs can provide a great boost to morale.

In the same vein, it is important to recognize that every employee is different. Each worker may respond best to a different style of management and it is critical to account for this. Incentives that may greatly motivate one type of employee may have no effect on others. Interacting with each staff member in their preferred style of engagement can make a huge difference in how management efforts are interpreted and what impact they have on employee loyalty.

This highlights the importance of engaging with employees and encouraging them to make it clear what works for them. Managers and workers should maintain open lines of communication at all times to ensure that good ideas get to the decision-makers and that all employees feel connected to the company as a whole.

Of course, building a quality staff starts with hiring talented individuals. Working with a firm of corporate recruiters helps a company to guarantee that is putting itself in the best possible position to allow it to attract the most qualified candidates with the best attitudes. Professional recruiters rely on the depth of their experience to guide their decision-making and match individual job-seekers to companies where they can thrive.

A business of any size can benefit from forming a partnership with a large corporation. Well-established companies can offer insight into how the industry works and what your business can do to survive and thrive in the future.

Of course, you have to make certain that your team is ready for the challenge before jumping into anything. Dropping the ball in a big-league partnership can embarrass your organization and hinder future networking efforts.

Even if your company appears to be up to par, it is still a good rule to start out on a small scale. You can be building toward a bigger partnership for the future while making sure that you aren’t overextending your staff in the present. You also want to avoid coming on too strong. You may think it shows ambition to pitch a big project, but in the more experienced eyes of your potential partner, it may look more like naivete. Avoiding the “hard sell” is a good general rule when it comes to working with other companies that are more established than your own.

It is also an excellent idea to bring a good lawyer with you when you ink the deal. It may seem like a confrontational action, but real professionals will appreciate that it is simply the smart thing to do.

By far, the most critical factor affecting your ability to form a meaningful partnership with a big business is the overall quality of your executive team. Large corporations want to know that there are level-headed decision makers in charge of a company before they enter into any serious arrangements.

This is just one of the reasons it makes sense to conduct every executive search in coordination with a firm of corporate recruiters. When you work with hiring experts, it guarantees that you will get the most out of your efforts, as professional recruiters are able to apply their experience to each search and ensure that any candidate they bring to a company is capable and qualified.

A lot of people probably assume that those who work in business are always meeting each other for lunch, based on the way such meetings are portrayed in popular culture. In reality, there is a very good reason why most executives rarely have lunch meeting. It is a huge time sink.

Between driving to the restaurant, waiting for service and eating at an awkwardly slow pace because the real point of the get-together is to talk – meetings held over lunch wind up taking much longer than necessary. And when you're dealing with busy executives, you'll find that they don't have time to waste traveling to and from drawn-out lunch meetings that could be conducted quickly and easily in the office.

So, the next time you want to get together and talk with someone who you know has a lot on their plate already, don't invite them to lunch. Take the advice of entrepreneur Mark Suster and be direct. Ask if you can stop by the person's office for half an hour. Offering to pick up coffee on the way can be a great way to score bonus points.

Just as executives don't have all the time in the world to go out for lunch all the time, they are also pressed in many other areas. For instance, running the company's hiring process can be immensely time consuming, involving many separate tasks and necessitating a lot of irregular scheduling. Also, communication during the hiring process is critical and should be conducted with careful focus.

That's why it makes sense to work with professional recruiters. Hiring experts work full time, focusing only on the task at hand, which is to find qualified candidates for a company's vacant positions. This removes a lot of stressful time commitments from the plates of businesses' decision-makers and guarantees the quality of a hiring process because human resource professionals are able to bring their experience and complete focus to the job.

As anyone in business can tell you, it can be tough to find high-quality candidates, especially when a critical position is left vacant at an inopportune moment.

There can be a lot of pressure on a company’s leadership to fill an empty position as quickly as possible. But, conducting a talent search is time consuming, especially when it comes to more complex roles. Executing a proper financial professional search can be a grueling experience.

At the same time, the responsibilities associated with the vacant position have to be temporarily distributed among other workers. Thus, upper-level staff can suddenly find themselves buried in work that they aren’t used to doing at the same time that they are scouring for an appropriate replacement to fill the empty position. The ensuing stress can be significant.

Obviously, the best bet for resolving the situation quickly is to cast as wide a net as possible. This means exploring new and diverse sources of applicants. Placing ads in the newspaper and sitting back to wait for calls will not cut it in 2012.

There are a wide variety of online job listing and search sites and social networks are gaining traction as a source of job information and applicants. Temporary employees can be brought in to help manage the workload while a permanent replacement is sought. Some companies may even be able to implement a recruiting program targeting universities or professional training services.

It is also worthwhile to consider whether or not the person currently in charge of hiring is the best fit for the job. Even outstanding entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily the best hirers.

When it comes to searching for talented financial professionals to fill critical roles, the best thing a company can do for itself is to contact a firm of corporate recruiters. Hiring professionals are able to dedicate their full time and attention to conducting the most thorough search possible, allowing them to use their expertise to bring the right individuals and employers together.