After last week’s enthusiastic response to our issue on writing skills, we’ve decided to ride that momentum with another transferable technical skill: budget management.
Working with a budget can be one aspect of project management, but it shows up across so many career areas that, depending on your career goals, it may be worth a separate mention on your resume.
You may already anticipate some careers that deal with money management—like business, administration, finance, human resources, or sales—but budgeting skills frequently show up in areas well beyond the expected. If you are aiming to work in engineering, IT, analytics, marketing, health care, education, hospitality, or customer support, chances are, you’ll eventually be faced with a budget to manage, particularly as you advance in your career and move into more prominent leadership roles.
Whether your budget is for people, services, tools, or products, the fundamentals of bookkeeping and accounting remain the same. In fact, these skills can even extend beyond career benefits and transfer into your personal finance practices.
Key stages of budgeting and financial management
When you’re working with money, there are four key stages of financial management:
- Planning and budgeting: Here, you’ll use past and current financial data to set financial targets, modify objectives, and adjust your current budget. (Spreadsheet software can come in handy when you’re building your budget. Learn how to create a budget in Microsoft Excel.)
- Resource allocation: This is when you’ll decide how much money you’ll spend on various resources in order to meet your goals.
- Operations and monitoring: As you use your budget and work toward your goals, it’s good practice to continuously track your cash flow to make sure you’re staying on target.
- Evaluation and reporting: Finally, evaluate your financial management system and iterate to improve efficiency and effectiveness for future projects.
Using a formal process such as this one can enable you to maximize the impact of your budget and ensure that you meet your goals without wasting resources.
Start advancing your budgeting skills
Take a financial crash course with the University of Virginia’s Financial Accounting Fundamentals. In this highly-rated course, you’ll explore financial statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and more.
Practice project-based budgeting with the University of California, Irvine’s Budgeting and Scheduling Projects. This course adds the element of time to your project considerations, so you’ll learn how to balance two types of resource constraints here.
Learn bookkeeping basics with the Intuit Academy Bookkeeping Professional Certificate. Here, you’ll learn how to keep track of financial transactions, balance budgets, and reconcile financial statements.
Finally, if your budgetary concerns are more personal than professional, consider SoFi’s The Fundamentals of Personal Finance Specialization. You’ll learn about topics including long-term savings, managing debt, and investing.
That’s where we’ll leave you for this week. If you’re already a budgeting expert, tell us in the comments: What are your favorite budget management tools?