Description
Take your career to the next level and begin to adopt the skills of an aspiring CFO. Not only will you understand the CFOs viewpoint better, but you will learn the fundamental skills needed to be a strong leader.
This 10 pack includes a range of courses designed to take your thinking to the next level.
Pack inclusions:
- Managing risk
- Creating and sustaining a customer-focused organisation
- Making financial decisions
- Setting and managing priorities within the organisation: Mission and goals
- Setting and managing priorities within the organisation: Deciphering priorities
- Setting and managing priorities within the organisation: Motivation
- Setting and managing priorities within the organisation: Communication
- Developing the strategic thinking skill of seeing the big picture
- Mind-set and financial priorities
- Preparing and presenting a business case
These courses form part of the SkillsNet short course suite. Buy this SkillsNet value pack and save!
You will have 365 days to access to this course.
Audience
Any finance professional looking to advance their career to become CFO, deputy CFO, or other senior finance professional.
Choose an offering for each one of the bundle components then click on 'Add To Cart' button below:
Developing the Strategic Thinking Skill of Seeing the Big Picture
Description
When you think strategically, you consider the impact of your decisions and activities over time. You take a step back and assess how everything fits with everything else. This type of holistic, or big picture, thinking is almost constantly used by effective strategic thinkers. Big-picture thinking generates ideas and possibilities, stretching beyond short-term concerns or a parochial focus on one part of the organization. This course aims to help you develop this strategic thinking skill. It describes how the ideas of systems thinking can help you elevate your perspective, become skillful at making sense out of opposites and contradictions, and better understand cause and effect while managing your department. It also explains actions you can take to encourage big-picture thinking, such as aligning your department goals with those of the organization, considering how your actions and decisions affect a variety of stakeholders, and identifying and analyzing external factors. In addition, the course describes how understanding the organizational value chain can help you connect to the organization's strategy and strategic plans and, in turn, implement them more effectively.Learning objectives
- Recognise how to use the ideas of systems thinking to gain a sense of the big picture
- Choose the approaches that best take into account external organisational factors in a given scenario
- Recognise actions that encourage big-picture thinking in relation to the internal context of an organisation
- Recognise how an understanding of the organisational value chain can help you see the big picture
Audience
Functional managers, professionals, departmental leaders, and all individuals in key roles who want to develop or refine their strategic thinking skills
Offerings
There are no Offerings available for this course.
Setting and Managing Priorities within the Organization: Communication
Description
As a manager, you're responsible for ensuring that your team is focused on priorities – the goals that further your organization. But you can't achieve this without effective communication. You must convey to your employees what the priorities are, why they are priorities, and what their role is in advancing those priorities. Otherwise your team will be pulling in different directions rather than being united by a common sense of purpose. This course explains the elements of effective communication specific to laying out priorities. It gives you guidelines on preparing and developing a message that will resonate with your team. And it teaches you delivery and listening techniques to help you engage your employees in the priorities to motivate them to take action as a team with a clear focus.Learning objectives
- Prepare to communicate priorities to employees
- Recognise guidelines for communicating a priorities message to an employee
- Recognise how to listen effectively when discussing priorities with an employee
- Communicate priorities effectively in a given scenario
Audience
Team leads, supervisors, managers, directors, and strategic planners who manage organizational priorities to drive organizational success
Offerings
There are no Offerings available for this course.
Setting and Managing Priorities within the Organization: Motivation
Description
Harnessed properly, personal motivators can become the driving force for action on your department's priorities. As a first step to energizing your team to take action on the priority tasks and issues, you need to understand the values and rewards that motivate you and your team members. This enables you to get the most from your team. This course shows the impact that motivation has on your team's approach to its work. You'll learn about the importance of motivation for performance on priorities and some basic principles for taking actions to address team members' higher needs. You'll learn a technique for assessing your own motivational drivers and discover time management skills to help you stay motivated on priorities. And you'll see how to relate team priorities to individual team members to tap their full potential and focus their energy and enthusiasm toward action on your department's priorities.Learning objectives
- Recognise management actions that appeal to employees' higher level needs
- Recognise the connection between motivators and goal priorities
- Recognise how to manage your time wisely to further organisational priorities
- Recognise how to keep your team motivated on the right priorities
Audience
Team leads, supervisors, managers, directors, and strategic planners who manage organizational priorities to drive organizational success
Offerings
There are no Offerings available for this course.
Thinking Like a CFO: Managing Risk
Description
Thinking like a CFO means you're not just concerned about productivity and efficiency, but also about your organization's long-term financial health and sustainability. One way you express that concern is by how you deal with your department's financial, operational, and compliance risks. If you approach these like a CFO, your decisions will be more in line with organizational goals, and you'll be more likely to win senior management's support for your department's risk management plans. This course introduces you to a process for managing regulatory and financial risks in line with CFO priorities. It begins by focusing on general actions you can take to support CFO priorities for risk management and compliance. It then presents a method for identifying and categorizing risks your department could be facing. Next it teaches a ranking technique for prioritizing risks. Finally, it suggests an approach to developing a risk response plan for departmental risks.Learning objectives
- Identify actions to take to support CFO priorities in relation to risk management and compliance
- Describe the benefits of managing risk and ensuring compliance
- Recognise how to identify risks faced by your department
- Use a ranking technique to prioritise risks
- Focus on the right factors when developing a risk response plan
Audience
Functional managers, professionals, departmental leaders, and all individuals in key roles who want to align their financial planning and management activities with CFO thinking
Offerings
There are no Offerings available for this course.
Thinking Like a CFO: Mind-set and Financial Priorities
Description
Effective management of your departmental operations in terms of productivity, efficiency, and quality is important, but it's no longer enough to ensure success. You must also ensure you align your decisions and departmental activities with your organization's financial goals. You can do this by investing your resources profitably, maintaining a healthy cash flow, and managing your business risks adequately. Thinking like a chief financial officer, or CFO, in your everyday decision making and management can help you achieve these goals. Adopting a CFO mind-set will give you a better understanding of your organization's financial priorities and assist you in getting your CFO's buy-in for your budgets, project plans, and proposals requiring investment. This course provides some basic tips to get you started thinking like a CFO and explains why it's important to have that perspective. It then details the various responsibilities of CFOs in organizations to help you understand their viewpoint. The course then presents a practical outline of how CFOs pursue three of their basic priorities: managing costs, supporting revenue growth, and managing cash flows in the organization. Understanding how CFOs accomplish these priorities can help you achieve your departmental goals more effectively.Learning objectives
- Identify the value of adopting a CFO mind-set
- Recognise appropriate actions to help you think like a CFO
- Recognise what CFOs do in organisations
- Recognise how cost structure affects CFO decision making
- Use CVP to calculate sales required to achieve a desired profit
- Recognise ways of effectively managing cash in an organisation
Audience
Functional managers, professionals, departmental leaders, and all individuals in key roles who want to align their financial planning and management activities with CFO thinking
Offerings
There are no Offerings available for this course.
Thinking Like a CFO: Preparing and Presenting a Business Case
Description
Applying CFO thinking in your business decisions and departmental activities helps you align them to your organization's goals. It also helps you get senior management's support and approval when you present your budget, marketing plan, and proposals requiring purchases and funds. As a functional manager and departmental leader, you often need to make a business case for your requests for more resources and funds to the senior management. As several departments often compete for the same resources and budget allocations, your ability to prepare a strong business case and present it effectively becomes critical to your success. This course teaches you how to apply a CFO perspective in preparing and presenting a business case. You are walked through the typical steps for developing and presenting a business case. A key step is to analyze alternative solutions to the issue you’ve identified, and this course shows you how to use various financial metrics – payback period, net present value, and risk analysis – to decide between alternative possibilities. Next, you're introduced to a template for structuring your business case for best effect. Finally, the course demonstrates how to strengthen your case by anticipating the kinds of questions that management is likely to ask.Learning objectives
- Identify the types of activities that are involved in defining the business issue and identifying alternatives
- Decide between investment options based on payback period technique
- Decide between investment options based on the NPV method
- Decide between alternative proposals based on risk analysis
- Match types of statements to where they belong in a business case
- Anticipate questions a CFO might ask in response to a business case presentation
Audience
Functional managers, professionals, departmental leaders, and all individuals in key roles who want to align their financial planning and management activities with CFO thinking
Offerings
There are no Offerings available for this course.
Creating and Sustaining a Customer-focused Organization
Description
To create a customer-focused organization, you need an in-depth understanding of what types of customer-focused tools and solutions are available. And you must know the level of customer focus that you're seeking to achieve. As a manager, you also need to know how to select the most appropriate implementation strategy that aligns with your organization's capabilities and its objectives. This will help you to create stronger, more valuable, and lasting relationships and experiences for your customers. This course provides direction on how to approach, implement, and sustain effective customer-focused service strategies in order to increase your organization's competitive advantage.Learning objectives
- Determine the level and scope of organisational customer focus in a given scenario
- Implement a customer-focus strategy in a given scenario
- Recognise examples of how customer focus can be sustained in an organisation
Audience
Managers and leaders who want to develop their skills for approaching and implementing customer-focused service strategies
Offerings
There are no Offerings available for this course.
Thinking Like a CFO: Making Financial Decisions
Description
Thinking like a CFO gives you a better understanding of your organization's strategic plans, its operational priorities, and the impact of those priorities on your department. Making decisions and managing your day-to-day operations with a CFO mind-set can also help you get your management's support for financial plans, investment proposals, and funding requests. At a more operational level, many of your decisions and managerial activities related to budgeting, managing payables and receivables, incurring incremental costs, and making purchase decisions can benefit from a CFO perspective. This course presents some examples of how a CFO perspective is applied to many of the activities and financial decisions you make in your area of business on a daily basis. It presents some guidelines for functional managers for creating budgets, and best practices that may contribute to reduced working capital needs. And it teaches you how your request for incurring an incremental cost or making a buy or lease decision could be evaluated from a CFO perspective.Learning objectives
- Identify guidelines for functional managers when creating budgets
- Classify techniques for effectively managing components of the working capital equation
- Determine if incurring a step cost is possible for a company in a given scenario
- Decide between leasing and purchasing in a given scenario
Audience
Functional managers, professionals, departmental leaders, and all individuals in key roles who want to align their financial planning and management activities with CFO thinking
Offerings
There are no Offerings available for this course.
Setting and Managing Priorities within the Organization: Mission and Goals
Description
Getting your priorities straight, no matter where you are in your organization, is about keeping a focus on your goals. It requires you to think about the bigger picture to ensure your department's work supports the strategic objectives of your organization as effectively as possible. This course helps you establish priorities for your group by ensuring that its goals are properly aligned with the company-wide goals and mission. It begins by clarifying the distinction between strategic, tactical, and operational goals. It then shows you how to create effective goals. Next it takes you through a step-by-step process for ensuring that the departmental goals you create are suitably aligned with the strategic objectives of the organization. This includes helping you identify imperatives for action that keep you focused and on track to meet your objectives and ensure your team is working effectively through properly identified priorities.Learning objectives
- Distinguish different kinds of business goals
- Recognise the benefits of setting goals
- Recognise how to set effective goals for organisational units
- Align unit goals with company-wide goals and mission
- Derive imperatives from unit goals
Audience
Team leads, supervisors, managers, directors, and strategic planners who manage organizational priorities to drive organizational success
Offerings
There are no Offerings available for this course.
Setting and Managing Priorities within the Organization: Deciphering Priorities
Description
As a manager, you need to be able to determine the difference between what has to be done and what has to be done first. By establishing clear priorities, you provide your team with the focus it needs to take the most effective action and achieve its goals more quickly. If the department's priorities aren't deciphered and defined, the team may lose sight of what's most important and fall behind on objectives and performance. This course helps you set priorities for your departmental team. It begins by explaining the importance of managing priorities appropriately and the dangers of failing to do so. Next, it shows you how to use the Eisenhower principle to rank tasks in terms of importance and urgency. It then walks you through a detailed Pareto technique for deciding how to prioritize among problems in a given scenario and gives you an opportunity to practice this method. Finally, it teaches you some best practice principles for measuring performance on priorities.Learning objectives
- Recognise benefits of effective team priority management
- Recognise true statements about priorities and prioritising
- Use the Eisenhower hierarchy to deal effectively with priorities in a given scenario
- Use the Pareto technique to prioritise problem groups in a given scenario
- Recognise how to follow best practice for measuring performance on priorities
Audience
Team leads, supervisors, managers, directors, and strategic planners who manage organizational priorities to drive organizational success
Offerings
There are no Offerings available for this course.
