A good job brings stability and a desired lifestyle. Couple that with a career you enjoy, and it’s easy to fall into a comfortable routine. But even in the best of times, you never know what lies ahead. Sometimes unforeseen circumstances can thrust you into the job market when you…...
Who Should Your First Accounting Hire Be: Controller, Senior Accountant, or CFO?
Congratulations on successfully establishing your business and beginning operations! Now that you’re up and running, you may be considering your first accounting hire. But, how do you know what position to fill first? How can you be confident that your course of action is the right one? At Aronson, we…...
Closing the Diversity Gap
The accounting profession in the United States, encompassing public accounting and management accounting (accounting and financial professionals working in organizations), faces a crisis of growing proportion—a diversity gap—particularly at the leadership levels. This crisis contributes to the various challenges that prevent the profession from achieving longer-term sustainability, greater innovation, and…...
How to Attract More Women into Finance
It’s no secret that financial services is yet another sector in need of a gender re-balance. Despite recent successful campaigns, evidence indicates that women occupying senior positions in finance are largely represented in support functions, rather than fee-generating roles. This suggests that gender diversity remains an issue and that there…...
How to re-enter finance after an extended leave
People take career breaks for many reasons: To raise children, care for ailing relatives, manage their own health issues, or even explore personal growth opportunities (think travel and volunteer work). Regardless of why an accounting or finance professional temporarily leaves the workforce, figuring out how to re-engage after a long…...
Career Changes During the Pandemic
Shifting priorities during the global pandemic provide new job opportunities for finance professionals equipped to adapt to change. We’re living through a period of immense economic uncertainty as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to play out. In times like these, it might seem cavalier for finance professionals…...
The finance strategist: A new paradigm for a new world
Payables, receivables, closing the books, creating budgets, analysing variances — for decades these have been the core of the accountant's job. But times are changing. While assuring the integrity of financial statements remains job one, it is becoming an increasingly smaller part of the accountant's role. The combination of process…...
4 key leadership skills for a post-COVID-19 workplace
The post-COVID-19 workplace will not look the same in every country or industry, but for many managers, the pandemic presents both challenges and opportunities. Managers will have to adjust their skillsets accordingly. Many of the traits that have always been important for managers — empathy, clarity, authenticity, and agility —…...
People and profits: What it takes to be a revolutionary CFO
CFOs have been an invaluable commodity during the pandemic, steering businesses through disruption and making the tough choices needed to ensure continuity. Yet it takes a special breed of CFO to pull a business out of survival mode and back into growth, competitive differentiation and innovation. Businesses have lived with…...
From evolution to revolution: How tech can help the mortgage industry thrive post-pandemic
It’s no secret that the pace of digitalisation in the mortgage sector has been slow compared to other financial services sectors like banking or insurance. By and large, our sector has been reliant on pen and paper for far too long. However, Covid-19 lockdowns have forced the hands for many…...
If you want to be a CFO, develop these 3 skills…
There are three areas of skills you need to develop if you want to be a good Chief Financial Officer or Finance business partner – business acumen, technical skills and behavioural skills. And my intention is to unpack these three areas a little bit, so that you can get to…...
Financial Career Options for Professionals
A career in finance isn't all about money, though it starts there. For the business graduate, earning a degree is just the beginning. What's left is to take a closer look at the available career options and then to measure which industry sectors have the greatest need for new professionals. It's also important…...
CFOs Must Embrace a Culture of Equality
The numbers don’t look so good: Only 11 of the Fortune 100 companies in the U.S. have an African American, Black, Asian, Asian American, Hispanic, or Latinx CEO. Just seven have a woman at the helm. (Latinx is a gender-neutral neologism, sometimes used to refer to people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States.) Diversity among…...
Bank be nimble, bank be quick: how financial institutions can become more agile in times of pandemic
If banks want to survive and thrive in and after COVID-19, AI and machine learning are very important, but the current approach to making these technologies happen simply isn’t fit for purpose. Automating development, deployment and monitoring processes unblocks the bottleneck. You’ve probably heard the one about COVID-19 doing more…...
