Top skills of a Certified Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst (FMVA)®
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Should I hire someone with an FMVA certification? The ever-growing finance industry is always on the lookout for top-notch professionals. With an enormous pool of talent from diverse educational backgrounds, levels of expertise, and practical skills, one of the things that many employers look for is a credential.
The FMVA program is a popular choice among professionals in corporate finance. It covers a vast range of topics that you need to hone your skills further and move up the corporate ladder. The FMVA certification program involves performing financial analysis, building financial models in Excel, employing different valuation methods, and creating dashboards and data visualizations. You will also acquire skills that are essential in the finance industry, such as analytics, creating presentations, and soft skills.
1. Analytics
A professional with an FMVA certification can handle huge volumes of data and convert them into a format that’s easy to understand. They are experts when it comes to collecting, organizing, analyzing, and interpreting data.
2. Creating presentations
Analytics and presentations go hand in hand in the world of FMVA. If you know how to handle vast amounts of data but cannot interpret them in a simple manner, you will not last long in the industry. That’s why it’s crucial to put as much focus on presentations as on analytics. An FMVA professional is able to create compelling and visually appealing presentations, documents, and other relevant forms of communication.
3. Soft skills
An FMVA professional is not only proficient in analytics and presentations. They also should also acquire practical and soft skills that are essential in the industry. These include communication, personal branding, and work politics.
Advantages of Hiring a Professional with an FMVA Certification
FMVA professionals can be a valuable addition to your company, but what makes them different from the rest? Here are some of the reasons why hiring someone with an FMVA is worth it:
1. Learn different modeling methods
Different programs teach different financial models, so you’ll most likely learn more than one style of building models when you hire someone with an FMVA certification.
2. Create better presentations
The industry calls for a lot of documents and presentations that show data in a simple, clear, and persuasive manner. By hiring an FMVA-certified professional, you can be sure that you’ll see better charts, graphs, and materials that best convey the results of financial models. In an industry that involves a lot of numbers, you need someone who can come up with insightful documents that make it easy for people to understand what the figures are about.
3. Get an Excel master on your team
You cannot go wrong with an FMVA professional as far as Excel skills are concerned. Most, if not all, financial modeling programs focus on Excel skills, and for a good reason. An individual with an FMVA certification knows a wide range of keyboard shortcuts, formatting styles, dynamic formulas, and advanced functions that make it easier to organize and interpret large amounts of data.
4. Stay updated with industry trends and best practices
An FMVA professional on your team will help you stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry.Individuals who take an FMVA certification program will gain access to the best practices and insights of experts in the industry through instructors who most likely possess decades of experience in the field.
5. Expand your analyst toolbox
When you hire someone with an FMVA, they will be able to significantly contribute to building and expanding your database of different tools necessary in financial modeling. An FMVA professional knows a lot of Excel model templates that you can use for financial analysis. Your analyst toolbox will include a DCF model, LBO model, sensitivity analysis, M&A model, as well as other industry-specific models.
Final Word on FMVA Certification
Is it worth hiring someone with an FMVA credential? Absolutely! An FMVA-certified professional brings a lot to the table. Not only are they able to interpret data and create compelling presentations, they also possess the crucial practical and soft skills that the industry needs.
Additional Resources
CFI’s mission is to help advance the career of finance professionals, and with that goal in mind, the additional resources below will be a big help:
- Financial Modeling Interview Questions
- The Analyst Trifecta® Guide
- Walk Me Through a DCF
- Why Investment Banking
- See all team development resources
