What’s New at CFI | Communication and Presentation Skills for Finance Professionals

Meeyeon (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of What’s New at CFI, the show where we talk quite literally about the latest and greatest and the good newness at CFI. Today, we’re excited to talk about our latest communications course and it’s called Communication and Presentation Skills for Finance Professionals. Now, we all know technical skills are critical in finance. They’re very black and white and they’re one of the most important things that you need to demonstrate day zero in your interviews.

So that’s you know, encompassing building models, analyzing data, preparing forecasts, everything that we prep for you in our courses at CFI. But the truth is that if you can’t communicate those data insights clearly and confidently, they’re not going to have any impact and it’s going to be very difficult for you to further your career in finance. So this course is all about bridging that gap. And today I have none other than Ryan Spendelow with me, VP of training and curriculum here at CFI. Welcome, Ryan.

Ryan Spendelow (00:59)
Hey, Meeyeon, lovely to be back again.

Meeyeon (01:01)
And today we’re going to talk about just four kind of key points about this course so that we can give you a preview and you could dive right in. We’re going to talk about why we built this course, what you’re going to gain from it, why it matters to longevity and careers in finance. And then we’ll just hit on some format and features of the course. So let’s start off with the biggest question here, which is why did we build this course?

Ryan Spendelow (01:26)
Yeah, and Meeyeon, you’ve alluded to the why a little bit in your introduction. We have a lot of content at CFI on building technical skills. But to be a successful finance professional, you not only need those technical skills, you need these other skills as well. Sometimes referred to as soft skills, but I think that’s a bit of a misnomer. There’s nothing soft about them. But more these interpersonal skills.

And so we developed this communication and presentation course to help build these well-rounded skills that anybody needs to have a successful career in finance. And communication skills is absolutely critical, not only in finance, but in any profession and any career. But just talking about finance professionally at the moment, strong communication skills

are important because they will help learners accelerate their career and it will help our learners be more impactful in the career that they are in now. And there’s a lot of reasons why communication skills are so important. mean, how many times, Meeyeon, have you looked at a ⁓ job ad and it lists the skills required and communication skills is always in there, right? And there’s a reason for it. Because strong communication skills,

actually do a lot of great things. Now if you’re in a career in finance, one of the most important things to be able to do is build trust, not only with internal colleagues, but also external clients. And clear strong communication skills help you build trust. They also improve client relationships. They can also support decision-making. And so building trust,

building client relationships, supporting decision making, these are all critical things that we do in the financial services industry.

And thinking a bit more on a granular level, strong communication skills helps foster teamwork. If you’re able to communicate clearly with your teammates, that makes you more productive. It helps align teams. If you’re able to communicate your strategy or if you’re able to communicate the tasks on hand and what you need to complete those tasks, it helps productivity. It aligns teams so everybody is working in the same direction. So communication skills, know,

communication skills do a heck of lot of great things for any aspirational financial career. And actually just a really interesting thing that I always go back to is for many years I used to train in the classroom. So training finance professionals in various roles. And some of my clients I used to go back to year after year after year. I used to do graduate training for example and I’d go back to the same bank year after year after year.

And it’s really funny to see people’s careers progress and to see who the really successful people were. Because interestingly enough, I would probably say four out of five times, the people that tended to accelerate their career fastest weren’t the people with the best technical skills. They were the people with the best interpersonal skills, particularly communication skills. So, communication skills are just absolutely critical to anybody wanting to build a successful career in finance.

Meeyeon (04:56)
And one of the things that strikes me when we talk about communication skills and presentation skills, those two are very closely related and why they’re so important is I think of back in the day when I was an investment banking analyst, the top thing that you’re going to do day to day, the most routine task is you’re going to do some sort of data analysis and you’re either going to present it to your associate VP, managing director, whoever it be, but that person is going to be on your team and you don’t necessarily just hand them

file or a printout and then walk away. Typically, you’re going to need to tell them, know, here are the key points. This is what I found in my analysis. This is what you might find interesting. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions. And this course is really taking all like what seems like such a simple thing, but helping you realize how important they are and practice them. So that leads us to into the next question that we’re going to talk about is what

our learner is going to gain from this course.

Ryan Spendelow (05:59)
Yeah, great question. Hopefully, our learners are to gain a lot from this course. I think one of the most foundational building blocks of any effective communicator is the ability to listen actively, so active listening. And active listening is a skill. It’s not hearing, it’s not passively sitting there listening. Actively listening is such a critical skill because…

It builds relationships, it builds trust, and it allows you to engage productively with your colleagues and your clients. And so we talk about what active listening is, what active listening isn’t, and why active listening is such a powerful tool.

But we also talk about things that often prevent people from actively listening. Have you been in a situation before where you’re talking to someone, Leon, and you can see in their head they’re not really listening to you? They’re thinking about the next thing that they’re going to say? That’s not active listening, is it? And so we talk about the things that stop people from actively listening and how to avoid them. We also talk about avoiding other common communication breakdowns as well.

One of the most powerful things I think in this course is that we teach learners how to recognize their preferred communication style. Now there’s lots of communication models out there. The one that we introduced to the course is very, very straightforward. It’s looking at whether you have a passive, aggressive, or assertive communication style. And there’s also one that sort of sits in the middle, a passive aggressive communication style.

And we talk about how to recognize these communication styles and we talk about why having an assertive communication style is the optimal type of communication style. And we describe what assertive communication looks like, what it is, why it’s such a positive attribute to have. But critically, we…

go over some really good tips to help people adapt their communication style. So if learners kind of take this course and you think, maybe I am a little bit on the passive side when it comes to communication, or maybe I am a bit aggressive when it comes to communication, we’ve got some really good tips to help kind of adapt their mindset and move more to the assertive communication style, which is the preferred communication style.

We also talk about presentations in this course because presentations are such a major part of communication for many people in financial roles. So we talk about how to structure presentations, what delivering an effective presentation looks like, and helping our learners build really clear, engaging, and impactful presentations.

And the other thing that we look at actually is that we look at practical tips for not only talking about verbal communication, but we also talk about non-verbal communication.

And actually the other thing we do Meeyeon, is we go through some really useful practical tips that learners can use straight away to help them use both not only verbal communication effectively, but nonverbal communication. And nonverbal communication plays such a massive role in the way that we communicate with others. So much of our actual communication is done through nonverbal channels. Very little of our actual communication is done verbally through non-verbal communication channels.

Meeyeon (09:27)
And the next thing that I want to talk about is something that we’ve alluded through throughout this whole conversation and why communication and presentation skills matter so much in finance. From my side, I think when I was in investment banking, I got to work with a lot of different managing directors. Sometimes I was luckier than others, but the thing that stood out to me the most was

the person who was the most successful managing director, and by that I mean the person that brought in the most revenue, brought in the most business, was not necessarily the person that I thought was the most academic and most technically adept person. It was the person that, of course, they’ve reached managing director status, so they know what they’re doing, they know their line of work.

They have practiced all of the technical skills as they made their way from analyst all the way to managing director. But at the end of the day, what sets them apart from the other directors that weren’t promoted to managing directors that don’t become heads of business units is that people like them and people like them because they have great communication skills. And it’s not just with peers at the bank or with clients, but it’s also with the teams that they lead.

Even though the team of very strong independent contributors, the way that they communicate to analysts, associates, VPs, their peers that are managing directors is so well, like so fine tuned, so true their personality. But it is, it is just, there is this professionalism as well as likeability that all comes together. You know that you’re going to work together while the person is really on top of communicating

with you, whether it’s on the task that you’re doing currently or what’s coming up in the next week or what the next quarter of business will look like and how that will shape your workflow as an analyst. That person is just an excellent communicator on all fronts. And ultimately for me, the fruition of that is just someone that is quite likeable because they’re great to work with.

Ryan Spendelow (11:42)
Yeah, Look, you’ve said it so, you’ve summed it up really, really well. There’s a saying, right, that don’t worry, it’s not personal, it’s business. But that’s totally the wrong way around. All business is personal, right? Because all business is about building relationships. You will be more successful in business if you can build strong relationships. And people want relationships with people that they like. That’s human nature.

And so to build those relationships, to build that trust, to build that credibility, skills, strong communication skills underpins all of that. So I’m not surprised to hear you say that the most successful managing directors, or the managing directors that people wanted to work with the most, or the most likable ones, were the ones with the strongest communication skills. It makes perfect sense to me. So that’s a great example of why communication skills really matter for finance careers. It helps anybody, as you said as well, Meeyeon, you talked about managing directors

but you also talk about analysts and managers and stuff, right? So, strong communication skills helps analysts, managers, and executives build relationships and influence business outcomes, making strategic decisions. And ultimately, as we said earlier on, people that have strong…

interpersonal skills, so communication skills, for example, being one of them, people with strong interpersonal communication skills are likely to have their careers accelerated relative to other people at their same level.

Meeyeon (13:13)
Exactly like, for example, I would say one of the things that you’re going to get out of this course that you communication comes in all different formats in different ways and it’s all influenced by you and your personality and what feels most natural to you. But at the end of the day, what you’re to walk away with is that sitting at your desk doing your work, minding your own business is not going to be the most effective type of communication. You’re to see how communication comes into your workflow.

And last but not least, I want to talk about some features and formats that might be a little bit unique to this course. Of course, we have interactive exercises throughout our course to make sure you the learner are engaged and practicing. All of our courses are not, they’re not spectator sports, so to speak. When you’re looking for skills development and finance, it is not a spectator sport and you have to be participating. In this course, though, we have some fairly unique features. And so Ryan, want to…

Why don’t we let our listeners know what is going to be a really fun part of this course?

Ryan Spendelow (14:15)
Yeah, it’s a little bit different to a lot of courses some of our learners may have taken like a financial modeling course, for example. So in this course, we’ve got short practical lessons with real video examples of strong communication skills and demonstration of poor communication skills. So learners can see the impact both of those things have on their colleagues. We have some diagnostic exercises to help learners identify their preferred communication style.

And then we’ve got some practical tips to help people adapt their communication style to make it more effective. And we’ve also got some really strong just step-by-step frameworks to help our learners structure those presentations so that they’re clear, that they are impactful, and that ultimately they have a strong call to action, which any good strong presentation should have.

Meeyeon (15:05)
And with that, that was our quick but very thorough look at communication and presentation skills for finance professionals. I hope that whether you are an analyst, an aspiring analyst presenting to leadership, a manager that is running large teams and meetings, or just a finance professional that is preparing a report, this course is going to give you the tools that you need to communicate with confidence and clarity and the impact that you want.

So, thank you for tuning in to What’s New at CFI. We’ll be back soon with more updates on our latest courses and resources. Of course, it has to rhyme to help you advance your career in finance. So until next time.