Most finance professionals, at one time or another, dream of being a Chief Financial Officer. While becoming a CFO is a popular aspiration, it is not easy to achieve. CFOs must possess strong analytical and communications skills to both understand and explain complicated financial data. Today’s CFO must master areas outside the finance arena including: regulation, globalization, technology, risk, transformation, stakeholder management strategy, reporting, talent, and capability. The team at Deloitte summarizes the modern CFO’s job in four diverse roles:

After almost two years of uninhibited growth, IT hiring is beginning to slow. Following six consecutive months of strong IT job growth, there was a dramatic dip in August 2014. Only 3,700 IT jobs were added to U.S. payrolls last month according to Foote Partners.

It really is unavoidable. Every office has their version of “office politics” and to some degree everyone has to play their part.

If it seems you can’t turn on the radio or TV lately without hearing about another data breach, it’s because you truly can’t. Data security is imperative and top-of-mind for everyone from consumers to CEOs. As an IT professional, it is critical that before you move your organization’s data storage to the cloud, you have a deep understanding of cloud data security.

Most accounting and finance professionals reach a point in their career where they consider obtaining a certification or an additional degree of designation. One of the questions I get asked most is whether an MBA or CPA is better for career advancement? The answer should be based on the career path you want in the future and in some cases having both is ideal. You might also need to consider the investment of time and money in obtaining one or the other. There are requirements for obtaining the CPA that entail a certain number of hours in accounting simply to be eligible to sit. On the other hand getting an MBA requires acceptance in to an MBA program.