A day in the life of a coder in Finance
Anders Liu-Lindberg
Leading advisor to senior Finance and FP&A leaders on creating impact through business partnering | Interim | VP Finance | Business Finance
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In this series, we’ve been looking at the increasing pressure Finance professionals experience to switch their focus to coding. I've explained my thinking: that instead of doubling down on our technical skills, we should instead be focusing on attributes that move us further up the value chain, such as communication, collaboration, and insight-generation.
Certainly, though, the lure of coding boot camp remains a strong one. So, say you did wish to divert your career towards coding and data science. What would this look like in practice? Let’s take a look at a day in the life of a coder in a Finance department.
Entry requirements
First, you need to retrain - or train in the first place. There are boot camps all over the world to help you do this, and some larger employers are establishing schemes to help professionals transition toward data science.
But it’s a long process - you’re learning an entirely new skill set, as we've discussed. And, of course, while demand for professionals with coding experience is increasing, so too is competition for entry-level roles. This can be a particular shock to mid-career professionals who decide to 'pivot'.
Then what?
Once you’re trained, your work is likely to be very different from what you’re doing today. In fact, your new work will likely involve building tools to enable other people to do some of the work that you had been doing previously. There is, of course, the real value in this - it is undeniably important that Finance tools are designed by (or at least with) people with Finance backgrounds.
You might work on projects that help Finance Functions gather, wrangle, and analyze data more efficiently. You might be building new tools and applications to enable businesses to manipulate data in different ways. You might work on client-facing projects too.
But what happens then? You need to be aware of the limitations on career progression facing dedicated Finance coders.
Kinks in the value chain
For example, you might create a system that produces better-quality analysis - but you’re almost certainly going to be siloed away from the other stakeholders. You won’t get the chance to present or take credit for the analysis - only for the system.
This means you are divorced from the value created by your work - or, at least, separated from it by a larger number of degrees.
There is another option, of course, which is to position yourself not as a specialist but as a valuable semi-generalist; someone who acts as a nexus of collaboration between functions, and who helps different stakeholders generate better outcomes. That role is known as a business partner, and that's where I believe the real value lies.
Successful professionals in any field need to know what it is they are trying to achieve. Coding, business partnering, and 'pure' Finance are clearly very distinct fields. They are all valid and valuable, but they are also entirely different disciplines with different skill sets. Choose wisely!
This was the fourth article in my new series about coding. You can read the past article(s) below.
While you await future articles why not read my latest series about frontier technologies in Finance? You can read all the articles below.
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Continue reading below for more articles about how digital is impacting Finance.
Anders Liu-Lindberg ?is the co-founder and a partner at the?Business Partnering Institute ?and the owner of the largest?group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering ?on LinkedIn with more than 10,000 members. I have ten years of experience as a business partner at the global transport and logistics company?Maersk . I am the co-author of the book “Create Value as a Finance Business Partner ” and a?long-time Finance Blogger ?on LinkedIn with 75.000+ followers and 150.000+ subscribers to my blog. I am also an advisory board member at?Born Capital ?where I help identify and grow the next big thing in #CFOTech.
Accountant
2 年Being a finance professional, I have also been thinking the same. Fact that learning never stops and we need to push ourselves to remain in the present situation.
Jefe de Productos Financieros SSC en LATAM Airlines
2 年Lem Joseph Saab Barreto topic for discussion, and future article (perhaps).
DIRECTIVO FINANCIERO CON AMPLIA ENFOQUE OPERATIVO Gerente de Finanzas y Tesorería en CERRACO MEX SA DE CV
2 年Discover which are the most adding value skill inside us, is certainly a great step forward, and developing insights and using our influence and persuasive foresight to become this insight into invaluable actions and decisions.
Coding in Finance does not have to be a speciality - it can be an extra skill that makes you more effective. Like an extra foreign language. Or project management skills. Or training skills. It is very often that routine work can be automated with a script of only couple of lines. As software developers are a lot in demand and automation (mini-)projects in finance are rarely given priority, it is just handy to be able to do it yourself. And if we extend the perspective to automation in general, low/no code approached work best when they are implemented by the people that are in the middle of the respective processes. (Before automating a process, the first step is to see if the process should be improved; automating a shitty process will bring only, well, a process that works badly, but faster.) So finance automation by finance people. :) If you combine in finance business partnering the understanding of the business and the coding perspective, then you are able to produce small wonders. Which usually open the minds of people around and lead to bigger wonders :D
Helping Finance Managers of ‘busy’ SMEs improve profits | Turnaround 'busy' loss-makers | Improve profits of the already profitable | A proven step-by-step process | 90-day projects | Training & Coaching throughout |
2 年Clearly, learning to 'code' is an excellent skill to have. But is there a chance (do you think) that SOME (not all) who follow this route - do so because they feel it better suits their personality than the other end of the Finance role: developing (or working with others to develop) insights, and using their influence and persuasive skills to turn those insights into decisions and actions?