With finance and accounting professionals often performing complex and demanding tasks that have a direct impact on business success, there’s an obvious need for them to be equipped with many technical skills gathered through years of experience and education.

However, these skills and role-specific expertise are just a piece of the puzzle – success in finance or accounting also requires a number of equally important soft skills.

Pairing these soft skills with the more technical skills are instrumental to success in the finance and accounting fields. So, if you want to get ahead in your career, these are the attributes you should actively work on improving.

Or, if you’re hiring for a new finance or accounting position, the following will be just as useful, as these are the skills you should be looking for in your candidates.

Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills

Hard skills are the job-specific duties required of a role. These are often technical, measurable, and objective and can be taught or learned through training.

Soft skills, on the other hand, are more subjective, but equally important skills that make someone a valuable asset to any team and in any role they take on.

An ideal employee possesses an equal mix of both soft skills and hard skills, but in professions like finance or accounting, where the focus is often on the more technical aspects of the role, it can be easy to overlook the importance of soft skills.

So, if you’re looking to develop your skillset, keep these 8 soft skills in mind:

1. Communication

You may be highly capable of interpreting the data and creating, but the results you produce are only as good as your ability to communicate them to key stakeholders.

If you can present your analysis and ideas confidently and concisely, you’ll be able to better influence decision-making and make much more of an impact in your role.

Think of communication in finance as an act of translation: you must be able to convert intricate technical concepts and hard data into clear, digestible information that others can trust and understand.

2. Attention to detail

The work you do as a finance or accounting professional is both highly impactful and highly sensitive.

That’s why attention to detail is so critical to your performance, and taking the time to ensure you cut out errors or oversights will go a long way in producing work that is efficient and accurate rather than rushed and error-prone.

3. Organisation

When working on any given task, you might need to manage large amounts of financial data, while adhering to strict deadlines and ensuring both accuracy and compliance.

The best finance and accounting professionals structure their time effectively and methodical in their approach to tasks to ensure they work efficiently and meet deadlines.

4. Adaptability

The regular introduction of new technologies and processes mean there’s a greater need than ever before to be able to quickly pick things up and change the way you work to meet the needs of the business.

In doing so, you’re able to bring more value to the table than others who are resistant to change and whose success is contingent on them being able to work with specific tools or in a particular way.

5. Problem-solving

If you work in finance or accounting, you likely have a number of regimented processes in place to help you accomplish very data-driven responsibilities.

But, when change occurs or conflict arises, you can’t always fall back on numbers and systems – you must also be able to think outside the box and use your problem-solving skills to remove blockers, prioritise work, act with urgency, and make good judgment calls on key decisions/

6. Multitasking

You might prefer to use tunnel vision to see a single important task to completion, but this strategy runs counter to the reality of any finance or accounting position.

More often, you’ll have to juggle multiple tasks and responsibilities, so not only will you need to multitask, but you must be able to do so without your efficiency and attention to detail can’t falter as you take on additional work and responsibilities.

7. Foresight

Being able to see the big picture, understanding the impact of market and internal changes, and accurately predicting how your role, company, and industry at large will change are all critical for future success.

Of course, you can’t look into a crystal ball for the answers, but you can make efforts to anticipate change, particularly when it comes to trends that may impact your business, either financially or operationally.

8. Empathy

Finances are a delicate matter, so it’s important to possess and demonstrate empathy and emotional intelligence in your day-to-day interactions with stakeholders.

Always adopting a numbers-first approach to situations and interactions isn’t always the best way, so you’ll need the skills to be able to listen to others, understand their perspective and work with them to reach a resolution.

Final thoughts

The next time you’re taking stock of what you need to improve upon, pay equal attention to your soft skills.

These qualities aren’t just personality traits that will make you a nice employee to have around; they’re improvable skills that, when combined with the right hard skills, can make you more valuable to your organisation and accelerate your career.