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We know that 2024 has been a long year. There’ve been hurricanes, elections, interest rate cuts, and Brat summer. All of that volatility makes keeping up with and honing your skills as a finance and accounting professional increasingly important.
To help you keep up, CFO Brew is here to help with one of our most popular features, the LinkedIn Cheat Sheet Roundup. Every month, we gather three of the most useful professional development cheat sheets from across LinkedIn. This year, we’ve had editions focused solely on career development and accounting, as well as others offering multiple skill tips.
Since it’s that time of the year, we’ve decided to share some of our favorite LinkedIn cheat sheet tips that we’ve gathered in 2024.
Our usual disclaimer to the wise: You should always look for additional resources and expertise when doing complicated finance (or accounting) work, because it can be difficult to accurately sum up sophisticated concepts in a short space.
- Waqar Khan, “Microsoft Excel cheat sheet.” Look, we know that GenAI is all the rage right now, but AI hasn’t replaced Excel as the backbone of accounting just yet. To help accountants of all stripes improve their Excel chops, Khan posted this six-page cheat sheet covering basic, intermediate, and advanced skills and tools.
The basic skills section includes tips on getting started with Excel, keyboard shortcuts, basic formulas, and formatting shortcuts. For users with more experience, among the tips are chart types and elements, managing data, and collaborating using Excel. For advanced users, you’ll find guidance on creating pivot tables, macros, and advanced formulas. - MIT Sloan Management Review’s “How to support your team when uncertainty is high” is an eight-page slide deck based on an article written by Liz Fosslien that outlines “seven ways managers can support their teams during turbulent times without making promises they can’t keep.” Each of the seven methods is headlined with a short explanation.
For example, the advice to “Help each employee work toward their dream job” explains that while career growth within their current position might not always be possible, giving them opportunities will benefit their career. Other advice includes creating quick wins, offering clarity and context, and letting them say no. - James Perry, “8 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before Pursuing a Career in Accounting.” Much is made of the challenges of an accounting career and whether to pursue a CPA license. Perry, an accounting exam and career mentor based in Northern Ireland, runs through simple, but easy-to-overlook benefits of an accounting career.
For example, he addresses what he calls the “popular belief [that] says accounting is all about number crunching” by pointing out that consulting and advice now constitute most of an accountant’s role. He also notes that accountants “are always in demand” and that “accounting is almost recession-proof.” (Those two things alone tempt us into a career pivot!)